The Department for Education’s recently-published Enrichment Benchmarks are an important challenge to schools to be more than exam factories. They arrive at a good time. The preliminary report from the Millburn Review into adolescent and young adult unemployment decried this tendency as contributing to “a record of failure” in education that has fallen most heavily on white working class communities.

There’s a great deal to like about the Enrichment Benchmarks, much of which was discussed in a previous post. One of the stylistic features we most appreciate is the willingness to confront reality: working in isolation, few schools are likely to offer young people the range of enrichment opportunities needed to prepare them to succeed in modern Britain. To meet this test, schools will need to form durable partnerships—with one another and with other types of civil society organisations: businesses, hospitals, youth groups, sports centres, and the like.

What follows are a series of five recommendations for effective partnership working based on our respective experiences of building these relationships. We are not focused exclusively, or even primarily, on Enrichment. We hope our recommendations are relevant to schools looking to partner with other types of organisations in support of any goal that improves the quality and effectiveness of the education they provide. They could equally apply, for example, to schools wishing to partner with local businesses to meet rising, if still wooly, expectations of vocational education.

For our purposes, we take ‘educational partnership’ to mean any agreement between one or more schools and a third party organisation that contributes to the quality and/or effectiveness of students’ education, and based on which either party may reliably commit resources or make medium-term plans.

1. Start with self-awareness

One of the principal obstacles to schools partnering well with other types of organisation is that schools are profoundly strange institutions whose staff regard them as profoundly normal. Timetables, duty rotas, directed versus ‘PPA’ time, leadership points, safeguarding regulations, routine consultations—most of these are either alien to or have only indirect parallels in commercial businesses. Even other parts of the public sector, culturally closer to schools, often function very differently.

Expectation of partnership behaviours will be correspondingly different. A common point of tension is the tendency of business leaders to imagine that schools can match their agility when it comes to organising events or programmes at short notice. This is almost never true. Many school staff and leaders make the mistake of framing this as a shortcoming of the partner.

A better strategy is to start with a recognition of our own idiosyncracy and try to explain to potential partners the limitations schools face, what sorts of opportunities they find useful, how they can best take them up, and to identify the broad swathe of well-intentioned activity that is likely to prove too challenging to undertake.

2. Partner wisely (and at the right level)

Choosing the right partner organisation, or organisations, is probably the single most important decision a school can make. Partnership needs to be grounded in a shared set of values and perhaps even a shared philosophy. The London Academy of Excellence has partnered for several years with the global law firm Latham & Watkins. The partnership is founded on a shared commitment to excellence, an unapologetic level of ambition and a willingness to take risks and try new things. These values don’t diminish the importance of clear goals and rigorous planning, but they are the connective tissue that enables the partnership to hang together if ever day-to-day reality undershoots our expectations.

Leave a comment

It also matters where and with whom the partnership rests. People who work in schools are often uncomfortable with professional hierarchy, but it exists for a reason. Partnerships need institutional commitment that can only be delivered at a senior level. A head of department might start working with a local museum, for example, but the relationship can only become a partnership in the sense suggested above if the Head or Principal commits to it. The same is true from the partner’s perspective; the curator of a specific exhibit can organise a trip, but she can’t sign off on a multi-year partnership without the positive support of her Museum Director.

3. Set clear goals

It is vitally important from the start to establish the partnership’s near-, medium- and ultimate aims. Partnership itself is not an aim. Nor is ‘giving something back’, satisfying government priorities, networking, promoting social cohesion or raising school profiles. Such levels of vagueness serve no one well. The wider aims can be highly ambitious, such as improving social mobility, but they need to be chunked into identifiable, achievable milestones. If these aims are closely tied to addressing known curriculum deficits or extra-curricular developments that could however tangentially improve results, then they will be undoubtedly secure greater buy-in from teachers.

This search for purpose needs to be based on a sound and secure understanding of the specific issues being faced in-school and the partner’s effective capacity to support. Ideally, this rationale and the goals that flow from it will be captured in a clear memorandum of understanding or other guide to how the partnership should function in practice. The function of such documents is not any legal weight they may carry; it’s the clarity of thinking and the extent of the dialogue necessary to produce sensible goals in the first place.

4. Review and adapt regularly

Successful partnerships aren’t set in aspic; they evolve. Day 1 priorities only remain relevant on Day 1,000 under two circumstances: either they were framed too abstractly, frustrating the need for clear goals; or the partnership has failed to deliver. Change is inevitable, and needs to be recognised, so that a partnership is not seen to be meeting expressed needs that may have been relevant from years before, that have now radically shifted, or been met.

There needs to be an upfront agreement as to who is given the power to agree or to veto approaches from other schools and to clarify procedures to shift the balance and focus of the programme or partnership as and when it is needed. So a useful question any partnership should be asking themselves from the very beginning has to be, what developments might be next? Planning in quite formal opportunities to re-visit the ‘What Next?’ question at a project level is key.

Perhaps there is a need for an annual exercise revisiting the extent to which the partnership is meeting its overall objectives. Closely followed by how best to capture processes, rather than just narrative descriptions, to try to preserve the authentic voice of the educators and learners to enable practice to be understood as it is.

5. Cultivate trust

It is easy in education to assume that goodwill is in endless supply. Sadly, this is not the case. Likewise, partner organisations can never be as steeped in school values and culture as people working in the school itself. For these and other reasons, a genuine partnership must have the development of trust as a central objective, contributing to its effectiveness and longevity.

There is no substitute for candid, ongoing dialogue about the partnership. Conversations must focus as much on identifying what isn’t working and how to correct it, as on celebrating those things that are already working well. Review meetings are therefore essential, but so are clearly-identified points of contact, regular check-ins and the willingness to pick up a phone, write an email or otherwise reach out in the moment. In summary, thought needs to be given to how the hearts and minds agenda becomes central to the moral purpose of the relationship between colleagues from both partners.

Bridget Phillipson has made working class kids’ entitlement to high-quality enrichment activities a soap box issue for most of her tenure as Education Secretary. Visitors to her Sanctuary Buildings’ office report a scattering of independent schools’ glossy brochures featuring the sorts of sporting, artistic and other opportunities that have come to mark the divide between fee-paying and state-funded education. Why, Phillipson has been known to ask visitors, aren’t these opportunities available for all students?

She is right to ask. The benefits of enrichment activities have been clear for generations, as have the costs of missing out. The Social Mobility Commission broke no new ground in 2019 when it concluded that students’ achievement, attendance, willingness to remain in education, and overall wellbeing were all highly positively affected by participation in a wide range of enrichment activities. The Commission also noted: “Wide parts of life experience gained from extracurricular activities are unavailable for the most marginalised groups in society.”

The intervening years have encompassed the AI ‘singularity’, a development which may yet prove singularly bad for child development. The prospect of liberating children from excessive screen time and cognitive and creative ‘offloading’ adds urgency to the call for schools to provide enriching activities that contribute to a more intentional childhood.

Last November, Phillipson announced "a new enrichment entitlement for all that includes civic engagement, culture, nature and adventure, and sport" as minimum requirements. To underline the importance of these aspects of schooling, she said they would be formally assessed by Ofsted. The subsequent schools white paper doubled down on that commitment by promising an Enrichment Framework for schools. Unusually for government guidance, the Framework itself was released on time in June. The Framework includes eight benchmarks for Enrichment activities for all schools and, to the authors’ credit, includes case studies from across primary, secondary, special needs and alternative education.1

Wide variations

Statutory guidance, in order to be workable, aims to set a minimum standard for provision. Typically, it also shines a light on the diversity of practice across schools, stimulating debate and, hopefully, a degree of healthy ‘consumer’ pressure. So it has proven with Enrichment for All.

Research by SchoolDash suggests that the number and nature of clubs differ widely across the country. SchoolDash found that the (mean) average school offered 13 different types of club, but the range of activities varied in lockstep with other factors. Bigger schools in towns and cities, and schools with sixth forms, tended to offer the widest range of clubs. So did those with higher proportions of ethnic-minority pupils. Grammar schools tended to have a wider variety of enrichment clubs than other types of state-funded schools, in part reflective of their more middle class parent communities.

In general, the breadth of enrichment activities, as well as the type of activity offered from school to school, was inversely correlated with its level of deprivation (see graph below). The challenge of raising students’ attainment to levels needed to remain in education or training tended to consume most of the energy in schools working in poorer communities with lower attainment on entry. These schools tended to score highly for breakfast, cooking and homework clubs—though only one of these can fairly be called ‘enrichment’ at all.

Schools in more affluent communities had more scope to focus on other things: art, debating, computer science and university clubs. Readers familiar with the schools landscape will already have derived the regional implications of these statements: schools in London and the South East tended to offer a significantly wider range of activities than those elsewhere in the country.

Differences in the type of enrichment activities on offer also reflected school ethos. Catholic schools, for example, offered a wide range of musical opportunities but were not generally places where one could find thriving societies devoted to LGBTQ issues.

Partnerships, funding

Natural supporters of the Labour government will likely be reassured by the Framework’s sensitivity to place and to context, but rattled by its implicit admission that some schools will continue to do much more than others. An example of the latter is the Framework’s acknowledgement that schools aiming to offer the richest enrichment programmes will require philanthropic as well as public funding and likely also partnerships with other types of organisations. Neither philanthropic capital nor strong partner organisations are evenly distributed around the country.

Share

The Enrichment Framework is an overwhelmingly positive piece of work, well targeted and sensibly framed. I will not be alone in pointing out the lack of substantial dedicated funding to support schools in implementing its recommendations. This is not, sadly, a return to the Extended Schools Programme of the early 2000s–blown apart in 2011 by an opening salvo in the Coalition government’s austerity barrage. More constructively, however, there are four points I will offer as EBIs.

I admire the Framework’s openness about the need for external support, including financial support to mount a truly excellent Enrichment programme. But, if we are to be candid, not all school leaders are equally good at working with philanthropists or partner organisations. My own school, the London Academy of Excellence, operates one of the widest enrichment programmes in the country at our phase of education. We have tried to be open about the debt that owes to generous philanthropic support. Some of those partners came to us having exhausted attempts to work constructively with other schools. Best practice guidelines for partnership working sitting alongside the Enrichment Framework would have been a welcome addition.2

Children’s wellbeing could be weighted more heavily in the overall index of Enrichment benefits. Notwithstanding the Education Secretary’s personal record as a footballer and hockey player, not to mention her well-advertised support of Houghton Rugby Club, there is nothing here to match the French government’s requirement that all schools host sporting associations that offer students up to three additional hours of extra-curricular sport (sport scolaire). In the current climate, this seems to carry too high an opportunity cost.

The independent sector has been overlooked as a valuable, if not unique, source of best practice. For decades and in some cases centuries, independent schools’ reputation and self-understanding rested on their co-curricular programmes (no-one would think to use a term such as ‘Enrichment’, which implies ‘extra’). Some of these programmes will remain too culturally distinct, others simply too expensive for most state-funded schools. But assuming their irrelevance ipso facto seems more a function of ideology than of practicality.

Finally, the Framework could have been embraced more tightly and championed more boldly as an opportunity to re-assert the value of holistic schooling. The occasional intrusion into the Framework of bureaucratic phrases such as ‘non-examined activity’ reinforces the deeply-planted assumption that schools remain primarily qualification factories rather than places where the next generation is responsibly and joyfully inducted into the culture. Parents of all backgrounds consistently express their support for this more ambitious vision. Recovering this sense of schools’ fundamental role should be central to any conversation about Enrichment.

Subscribe now

Before it was replaced by existential despair about generative artificial intelligence, organised meetings between educators were almost always dominated by discussions of inequality. Responsible teachers and lecturers were rightly frustrated by the factors that tether students’ attainment in school to the affluence of their home.

Journalist and education policy wonk has contributed an effective provocation to ongoing debates about the ‘achievement gap’ in England’s schools. Freedman’s argument, shared in his excellent substack, can be boiled down to three essentials:

(i) education serves and always will serve a social stratification function, rationing access to certain kinds of opportunities through certain kinds of credentials;

(ii) this gives better-off parents an incentive (they already have the means and, in a liberal society, the opportunity) to invest in ensuring their children do well academically in school; therefore

(iii) the academic achievement gap is likely ineradicable. Government policy should shift to making the gap less socially and economically significant.

These points make uncomfortable reading for educators, though they are well-supported by research, including valuable recent work by the Education Policy Institute, ImpactEd and the and the Sutton Trust.

Reduce academic selection

Diagnosis broadly accepted, in this post I’m going to focus on just one of Freedman’s prescriptions for a fairer schooling system.1 Freedman suggests making sixth forms less selective. His idea is that sixth forms should admit students on the basis of ‘a minimum standard required for doing A levels’. This would, he argues, broaden access to the type of opportunities that, ultimately, carry bigger pay checks or elevated social status.

This proposal is constructive, but not yet practical.2 What would it take to make it both? First, we would need clarity on what we mean by “a minimum standard” for A level study, who should decide it, and why we need one. The third of these questions is the easiest to answer. We need a minimum standard so that adolescents aren’t embarking on courses for which they are unprepared and in which they have no reasonable chance of success. A minimum academic standard is also a fair standard of human decency.

Share

Where should that standard be set? Most likely, Freeman is alluding to the sort of minimum entry criteria most schools require in order to consider an application of any type—typically a basket of good GCSEs including English and maths. This is a reasonable starting point, but no more. Many, if not most, sixth forms supplement their minimum entry requirements with subject-specific criteria. And almost one-in-five 16 to 19 year-olds studies a mix of A levels and other qualification, typically BTECs, T-levels, or other ‘vocational’ qualifications, that potentially have quite different entry requirements. Freedman’s proposal will require minimum standards at the subject level in order to be viable.

That’s a bigger ask that it might first appear. There is a widely-shared conviction among educators that GCSEs provide very different degrees of foundation for A level study. Exam results suggest that students achieving grades 7 at GCSE in English language, literature and the humanities (broadly defined) can do well in related A levels. The same is not true in STEM subjects, leading to the widespread practice of setting higher entry requirements for those subjects at A level. Cutting across the laudable aim of widening participation, the growth in A level uptake is almost entirely concentrated in those subjects with higher entry requirements.

This situation is compounded by yawning regional variation in pupils’ attainment at GCSE. Place has the single largest ‘effect size’, or impact, on a students’ likely achievement at age 18. London sixth forms, beneficiaries of the largest and best-educated group of students in the country, don’t have to choose between students’ suitability for specific courses and their own viability. Not so sixth forms elsewhere in the country. In practice, this means schools have very different entry requirements for A level study depending on where they are in the country.

I have yet to meet the Head of a high-performing London school or college who has not felt pressure from her or his Head of Maths to raise the entry requirement for Maths A level to a grade 9 at GCSE. (Further Maths, far harder, is often already there.) Most will compromise on a grade 8. Contrast that entry tariff with the proponderance of schools in the North East or South West of England, where average attainment is significantly lower, students are often admitted to Maths A level having achieved a 6, or even a 5, at GCSE, and to Further Maths courses one grade higher.

Who sets the standard?

If Freedman’s proposal is to have its intended effect, sixth forms could not be allowed to continue setting their own minimum entry standards. Discretion at this level would simply create structural stratification by school in places like London, Birmingham and Manchester that have large student populations. School-level decision-making would also likely result in students arbitraging grade entry requirements for in-demand courses more than is already the case—choosing to study Further Maths A level at the sixth form college with the lowest entry requirements, rather than for any other reason. Multi-academy trusts might tilt towards inclusion by operating sixth forms with different minimum entry requirements, but this still seems to fall short of Freedman’s goal.

An alternative locus of decision-making would for the Department for Education, or local councils, to take a direct role in setting minimum entry requirements for courses, independent of providers. Even allowing wide scope for expert input, this would almost inevitably further politicise the education system by drawing central or local government into decisions about students’ progression. Since no government could countenance a set of minimum entry requirements that would likely extinguish specific courses from some parts of the country, a likely near-term outcome would be a set of minimum entry requirements that were far too low to prove workable in urban centres and would likely consign more young people to inappropriate courses.

Central government has in the past couple of decades scrupulously avoided this sort of direct accountability for schooling outcomes. Were Whitehall to continue in this vein, one possibility would be to require Ofqual, or exam boards themselves—all at least nominally expert bodies—to publish recommended minimum entry requirements for each A level they accredit. I prefer this option to the dead hand of central government, but I can’t claim to be fully confident in its compatibility with student wellbeing.

Decision deferred

Reducing the role of academic selection in sixth form admissions might work for a ‘goldilocks’ school, one that receives just the right number of applications. These schools are about as common as flaxen-haired maidens whose social circle includes domesticated bears. In practice, some schools receive too few applicants, some far too many. The key to making the system work is providing oversubscribed schools with a fairer way of admitting students.

Freedman proposes the alternative mechanism of the lottery. I dislike the idea of admission by lottery at any stage of education. Partly, this is because it’s an open secret that some schools have used lotteries, banding and the like to engineer the student population they find most conducive. But partly, it’s because I think there are alternative admission systems that are both more progressive and easier to monitor.

Priority ranking, a form of contextual offer-making, is one such system.3 A school that admits students according to priority ranking commits to enrolling all applicants meeting a specific contextual criteria—say, eligibility for free school meals—before turning to any student not meeting that criteria. Combined with a commitment to admissions based only on minimum entry criteria, priority ranking might substantially increase the chances of poorer students being admitted to the best schools—a big step towards Freedman’s goal. However, priority ranking would still require a supplementary measure that allowed for ranking within priority groups.

The most practical such measure is straight-line distance from the school. This has the benefit of being (relatively) objective, but is a blunt tool with which to address educational inequality. The concentration of what in old money were considered Good and Outstanding schools in leafy suburbs means that distance-based admissions criteria tend to reinforce social stratification by house price. Some schools have responded to such concerns by locating their ‘nodal point’, the fixed location from which distances are measured, away from their physical school site. Given that house prices tend to respond relatively quickly to school improvement and oversubscription, a progressive admissions model would need to combine a distance measure with priority for under-resourced groups.

Risks and challenges

There are risks and challenges to reducing the role of academic selection in sixth form admissions. The most serious of these risks is to standards at age 16. Far from combating many schools’ fixation on exam results—fairly criticised in Alan Milburn’s recent work on youth unemployment—Freedman’s proposal risks scrolling back to the days of secondary schools focusing only on those ‘cliff edge’ grades that drove accountability standards. Why push for grade 9s when grade 6s will secure students’ onward progression to the sixth form of their choice? Many fellow educators will recoil at the very suggestion, but we should remember that this sort of behaviour is precisely what led to the last major revision to school accountability standards a decade ago. We need a policy-based solution to this incentive problem.

Share Powerful Knowledge

There are also challenges arising from the too varigated nature of our schools ecosystem. If we accept that forced ranking at age 16 is wrong, the same should apply at age 11. If national reference tests are to be the qualifying criteria for admissions to sixth form, the same should also hold for admissions to secondary school. For grammar schools, this means the practice of setting their own admissions tests, force ranking based on test scores, and probably interviewing prospective students, would all have to go, replaced, presumably, by a minimum CATS score above which they would be bound to make an offer.

This is likely to prove highly contentious. Grammar schools have proved to be possessed of a powerful lobby, effective in batting away even relatively cosmetic reforms—such changes to accountability measures that would have trimmed their progress scores while leaving their attainment untouched. Any government pursuing this agenda would need a strong stomach.4

There is also the incentive effect when it comes to parents. Freedman’s argument assumes that parents with means will continue to prioritise investment in their children’s education. Reducing the role of academic selection in the state schooling system might increase that incentive, leading to a modest revival of the fortunes of selective independent schools, at least in those parts of the country where the grammar system would have to be reformed.

As an aside, I definitely don’t accept Freedman’s point that universities should be given a free pass when it comes to admissions. British universities continue to receive variable, but almost always substantial public funding. Their operating model is premised on most students having access to public financing to pay fees and to support themselves. This seems like more than adequate justification for government policy to set guidelines for their admissions.

Is any of this very likely? Reform of the kind Freedman envisions would need to be system-wide and detail-oriented. Central government has a distinguished recent record in neither capacity. Any party of government intending to mount such a reform will rapidly confront interest groups made up of mostly middle class voters invested in the status quo. And education reform is, frustratingly, likely to rank far behind cost of living and immigration as policy priorities for at least the remainder of this Parliament.

This emphatically does not mean we should ignore Freedman’s provocation. Policy debates about inequality in education often resemble a learner driver attempting a three-point turn in a narrow cul de sac. At the very least, Freedman has encouraged us to consider reversing out of our current impasse.

Subscribe now

A little over a decade ago, an anonymous history teacher crafted a sardonic reply to Michael Gove, then-Education Secretary and boostering for a self-consciously Whiggish version of British history to be taught in schools. Our “Island Story,” Gove called it: a straightforward hop, skip and jump from the Magna Carta of 1215 to the Representation of the People Act 1983. Do mention the War. Don’t mention the slave trade. All his own work.1

The riposte took the form of a lesson plan, shared via the TES website, which asked students to compare chunks of Gove’s introduction to the 2013 draft history curriculum with translated passages from Nazi Reichserziehungsminister Berhard Rust’s 1934 guidance on ‘heritage’ studies. All across England, Year 9 students came to the reasoned conclusion that if your educational philosophy is pretty tough to distinguish from the Nazis’, you are probably not in a good place.

Gove lost his skirmish in the history wars–mostly due to the all-but universal condemnation of academic historians (Sir Richard Evans described Gove’s draft as “a pub quiz, not an education”) but school history teachers, too, played their part. Imagine our collective horror, 12 years later, to be presented with a proposed history curriculum that makes Gove’s version look nuanced and inclusive by comparison.

Reform UK recently unveiled plans for a “patriotic history of the British Isles”. The proposals, announced in time for St George’s Day, would require schoolchildren in England to cover events such as the Magna Carta, the Wars of the Roses, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the Act of Union, the Enlightenment and Victorian Britain. The party has said teaching on British imperialism or the country’s legacy of slavery must be “paired with the teaching of a non-European occurrence of the same to ensure balance”.

Suella Braverman, Reform’s recently-installed education spokesperson, accused schools of (somehow) having taught children “to be ashamed” of Britain’s past while omitting lessons about Britons who fought for freedom. All of this, she said, was (somehow) in service to successive Conservative and Labour governments’ “mass migration agenda”. Under a Reform government, teachers would be required (somehow) to teach in a way that “rekindle[s] national pride” while avoiding “a progressive lens” or “modern narratives”.

What Does Reform Want?

We should dissect Reform’s proposals carefully–even if they were not formed that way. This is now a national political party and a serious contender to form the next government.

Reform wants British history to form a minimum of 60 percent of the subject’s assessed content. Taken at face value, this would not be much of a departure from settled practice. Students studying history at GCSE are required to take four papers, two of which are focused on British history, a third of which is likely to involve a topic such as the First World War or the Cold War, both centrally important to British history, and a fourth focused on the history of a different society. A Level History tilts slightly further away from the British Isles, so would be more affected, but not radically so.

Teaching of historical topics in Key Stages 2 and 3 is more varied, but as both are recognised as leading towards public qualifications, it typically involves many of the topics and events to which Reform is so attached. For some students in some schools, Reform’s blunt quota would almost certainly represent a reduction in the amount of time spent on British topics. I doubt this is Braverman’s intent.

All of the historical events cited by Reform have a place in the education of British schoolchildren. How could they not? Most of them, in fact, already feature prominently in taught curricula. What they do not have, and what seems to be envisioned, is exclusivity. The playlist of British history’s ‘bangers’ is typically braided with historical fare that Reform may find more challenging–things like the colonisation of the Welsh Marshes, the Act of Uniformity, the Gordon Riots, the Peterloo Massacre, the Newport Uprising, the seige of Sidney Street, Bloody Sunday, the Brixton Riots and, yes, slavery.

A mature perspective on British imperialism must explore how and how far it was fuelled by rivalry with other European states. This is important historical context and an opportunity to draw meaningful comparisons. I’m doubtful, however, that this is what Braverman is getting at. There is, after all, only so much comfort to be taken from knowing one’s ancestors weren’t as awful as the Belgians in their treatment of colonised peoples. Gove, it was said, would have rehabilitated General Gordon. Reform might do the same for General Dyer.2

And what of that reference to “non-European” examples of imperialism and slavery? Does Reform really think this is absent from English schools? The past few years have seen a minor surge in interest in schools teaching about medieval African kingdoms, much of it sparked by Professor Toby Green’s work. The practice of slavery was common in these societies. Is this curriculum development welcomed by Reform UK? Again, this does not seem likely. In any case, it’s a suspect moral calculus that regards revulsion at human bondage as a fixed variable that can be subject to long division over many cases. Slavery as practiced by Europeans is not rendered less-than-reprehensible by being recognised as less-than-unique.

The Core Agenda

The core of Reform’s agenda for schools is, therefore, none of these things. Rather it lies in the party’s apparent desire to swap out the teaching of history and historical enquiry in favour of what the historian and journalist David Broder calls “memory politics”. Memory politics is history-as-propaganda: the deliberate selection and presentation of historical themes and events to justify and reinforce a contemporary political narrative.

Reform’s narrative is that Britain has been so unabashedly positive a force in world history that only wokeism or academic churlishness would lead one to point out its internal strife, its contradictions, its democratic missteps, or its mixed record as a sponsor of “freedom” around the world. Braverman’s reference to migration is the faulty dog whistle that alerts everyone to what else might, and what might not, belong in that narrative.

Leave a comment

The resort to memory politics is also founded on the misapprehension that young people are disenchanted with Britain because they no longer revere the Great Men of British History. (Capitals and gender definitely intended.) Braverman cited a 2022 survey by Policy Exchange that found only 20 percent of young adults have a positive view of Winston Churchill while also showing that only 41 percent of them were proud to be British. Post hoc ergo propter hoc? No, as it happens. Post hoc enim proper hoc. Young people have many reasons to feel disillusioned without assembling a historical rogues gallery to take the blame. Modern Britain has rogues aplenty.

But then, it always has. Many of those rogues were also, inconveniently, heroes. Nelson’s undoubted physical bravery and leadership qualities are not diminished by his vocal support for the slave trade. Educators do not and must not shirk from such conclusions. Neither do students, who, as the historian David Olusoga told an audience in London last week, “accept multifaceted historical personalities in all their complexity” without needing to settle on one, definitive judgement.

Ironically, the group that seems to struggle most with this sort of nuance can be found among Reform’s fellow travellers on the Right. Lord Andrew Roberts, about as Establishment a figure as one can imagine, was compelled last year to defend Churchill from attacks by right-wing commentators discomfitted by Winnie’s relative liberality when it came to civic rights, opposition to isolationism and downright warmth towards Europe.

There is an unavoidable truism here. People and societies are complex. They do not instantiate ideas perfectly, or consistently. History teaches us that. Whatever distracts us from that lesson, is something else.

One of the more persistent challenges of teaching essay-writing to sixth formers is many teenagers’ tendency to mistake stridency for sophistication. Some of our elected politicians suffer from a similar confusion.

In the past weeks, former Prime Minister Lord Cameron accused the current Labour government of trashing education policies proven to raise standards out of a sense of “spite”. Education Secretary Bridget Philippson fired back by rubbishing essentially all education reforms implemented during Cameron’s premiership and promising to repeal them. Neither position shows much nuance, or much regard for the evidence.

Fortunately, there is a model answer to hand for those seeking a guide to education reforms implemented by the Cameron government and chiefly associated with Michael Gove, the most energetic Education Secretary of the modern era.

Dani Payne of the Social Market Foundation last year provided an excellent assessment of Gove’s impact on British schooling. Gove’s reforms, Payne concluded, largely succeeded in raising standards in the ‘academic core’ but at the cost of pupils’ mental wellbeing and sense of belonging (see image below). In 2003, she points out, Britain was above average for both maths attainment and belonging. By 2022, maths remained above average but belonging had collapsed, placing Britain near the bottom.

The situation has not improved. Post-Covid, schools have suffered alarming spikes in pupil absenteeism, more pronounced in some communities than others. A recent international study of pupil engagement found that British children’s experience of school followed a conventional pattern—enjoyment and progress being generally high in primary, waning in secondary—but to a more extreme degree than in other, similarly affluent countries. The OECD has found that almost one-in-seven Britons aged 15 to 24 are outside of education, employment or training. That’s almost a million lives being idled away. The equivalent figure for the Netherlands is one-in-twenty-five.

As the recent Schools White Paper rightly points out, Britain has the least satisfied and optimistic 15-year-olds of any country in Europe. The schooling system is far from the exclusive cause of generational despondency, but as a system—as opposed to individual schools—it is not helping.

Share

How much of this can we attribute to the Gove reforms? The negative factors most commonly cited by fellow educators are the increasing burden of high stakes assessment, the lack of choice extended to pupils during their teenage years, and the ‘crowding out’ of typically high engagement activities outside of the taught curriculum. Each bears scrutiny.

The average 16-year-old will spend around 30 hours in an examination hall subject to relatively reductive tests of their receptivity to rote learning. The nature of this assessment ripple backwards in time, affecting what it taught, what is not taught, and how, from Year 7 onwards. Small wonder that engagement is in crisis in many schools. (To anticipate a common reaction: it is perfectly possible to believe in the importance of a knowledge-rich curriculum, as I do, while judging our existing examination system to be seriously flawed.)

It’s harder to assess the impact of restricting pupils’ choice over what they study. I supported the introduction of the Ebacc in 2011 as a corrective to the proliferation of low-value qualifications designed to flatter schools’ accountability measures rather than to equip young people with expertise useful in modern life. Fifteen years on, however, it is clear that they have not, as Gove argued, made British education “broad, deep and balanced” but narrow, superficial and, for many, lacking in relevance. The picture is complicated by the fact that pupil engagement seems to hold up marginally better in countries like France or Japan, where pupils have even less choice over curriculum pathways than in Britain.

‘Crowding out’ pupil engagement

The crowding out of creative arts subjects and co-curricular activities from state schools is, on a personal view, the most serious and socially regressive consequence of the Gove reforms. Schools unable to engage students in creative arts, sports, or other areas that speak to personal fulfillment, have unsurprisingly found it harder to generate enthusiasm for more traditional study. This development was exacerbated by the downward pressure on school budgets caused by fiscal austerity, which made these activities unaffordable for most schools. Hannah Rolley of Oxford University has rightly called attention to the fact that enjoyment in education has often been treated as a liability in the state sector, or at least in those schools to serve predominanly disadvantaged communities.

(Fee-paying schools spared the same financial and accountability pressures have, tellingly, held fast to the creative arts and to cocurricular activities. Access to a wider education is today one of the primary drivers of middle class parents’ preference for private over state schools.)

Share Powerful Knowledge

Structures, structure, structures?

The above is only contingently related to what has become in retrospect the signature reform of the Gove years—system-wide academisation. My own view is that academisation was essential to address underachievement in specific schools and specific regions, but at the national level it too often became a kind of cipher for substantive school reform. I’ve had too many conversations with partisans on both sides, unable to sustain a debate about what, substantively, should (or should not) happen in schools as a result (or instead of) academisation. High concepts like “independence”, “accountability” or “energy”, are simply too attractive a cheat code for politicians, civil servants and other wonks keen to skip the Big Boss battle of what actually works in schools.

The school I lead, the London Academy of Excellence, has been successful in part because of the Gove reforms—we would not exist without the creative disruption to the schooling system provided by the Free Schools Programme—but also because of our ability to swerve the unintended consequences of those reforms.

We operate at a phase of education where students exert the most choice over their curriculum. By introducing school-developed elective courses, we have extended students’ ability to tailor their learning pathways, within a curated framework. We have, critically, developed one of the largest cocurricular programmes in the country to keep engagement high, increase connectedness, and build character. A survey of our students conducted by British Future found that cocurricular activities “proved an important channel to improving students’ sense of rootedness and connection with their surrounding community”. And we have been successful in raising the philanthropic capital necessary to support all of this activity through periods of austerity.

We should not over-romanticise the pre-Govian past. I well remember the shocking levels of educational underachievement in working class communities, including my own, in the 1980s and 1990s. Conversations on the journey to collect our GCSE results did not centre on our plans for the future, but whether we expected to have ‘passed’ anything. The answer for most of my peers was ‘no’. Substantially all education policy introduced during the first quarter of this century has been motivated by a sincere desire to make this experience history. I believe this description applies to both Gove and to Philippson. Gove was good at diagnosis; less good at prescription. We must hope that Philippson is good at both.

I routinely draw on my own experience in writing this Substack but, to avoid being too nauseating, I don’t generally write about myself or my school. Events in the past week have changed the equation.

The school I lead, the London Academy of Excellence (LAE), has been doused by a firehose of publicity since we announced that more than one-in-four of our students received an offer to study at Oxford or Cambridge. For a predominantly state-funded school, this is a virtually unprecedented achievement.1

The Times published a front-page news story about us, wrote a leader article suggesting that our school should be cloned elsewhere in Britain, and followed up with a feature to appear in its weekend magazine. The BBC and various other news sites, radio talk shows and television news programmes also stopped by. To cap things off, former Prime Minister Lord Cameron celebrated our students’ success as proof of the value of education policies inherited from Sir Tony Blair and expanded by his own administration. Those policies are not in favour with the current Labour government.2

When I started this Substack, I noted with regret that no education practice is without controversy, no policy without overtones of wider ideological affinity. So it has proved in the past fortnight. Almost no commentator has failed to find confirmation of their pre-existing biases in the story of 62 hard-working teenagers—the vast majority from working class homes—who now have the opportunity to attend one of the world’s leading universities.

From my perspective, the most striking features of this commentary, be it positive or negative, is how singularly focused it is on the totemic principle of selection in schools and how rarely it coincides with the reality of schooling, either at the LAE or elsewhere in Britain.

What’s not to like?

Let’s start with the controversy. One commentator—I won’t use names—bemoaned the effect of our type of school in “removing students from their communities”. A moment’s pause to consider the staggering insensitivity of rendering judgement on young people none of whom they had ever met might have been in order. No matter. An LAE alumnus interjected to point out that this characterisation was far removed from his own experience or that of any of his friends.

Another writer suggested that the problem with educating young people from working class families to a high standard is that they might choose to leave the places in which they grew up. There is a serious point here—albeit well hidden—relating to the need for economic regeneration to run parallel with educational improvement in parts of Britain where graduate opportunities are scarce. To be fair to the original author, as a London school, we do not face this particular challenge.

However, the moral point at issue should be abundantly clear: any educator who thinks it legitimate to withhold educational opportunity from young people, anticipating that they may not approve of how that opportunity is used, has no business calling themselves an educator at all.

Thirty-nine LAE students hold offers to study at the University of Cambridge (pictured).

Most common and most telling is the refrain that pits institutional interest against students’ interest. Schools like ours damage “other strong schools” by acting as a magnet for bright, ambitious students, one education leader wrote. Never mind the fact that the London Borough of Newham was among the worst-performing education authorities in the capital when the LAE was founded here in 2012 and is now among the best in the country. (Not in any sense our achievement, but not unrelated to our existence.) In what sense are schools offering their students lesser opportunities “strong schools”?

Clearly, most of this criticism originates on the Left of the political spectrum. Most of our detractors would claim to oppose Neoliberalism, in education and in society more broadly. What’s perplexing, is that the tacit assumption that there is no wider social benefit to student success is itself a quintessentially Neoliberal position. It is also transparently false. One of the reasons LAE students are so successful is that the transformation in schooling in our part of East London has normalised the journey from council estate, to Oxford college, to corporate boardroom. Each of those individual stories represents a family and a community transformed.

Share

Reality calling

Wherever one’s sympathies lie, to read any of the above comments absent context would lead one to conclude that selection at age 16 is unusual in the British schooling system. The reality is exactly the opposite. The LAE is a post-16 school that offers A levels. There is essentially no such thing as non-selective A level provision in England, Wales or Northern Ireland. All A Level courses have admissions criteria, almost always expressed as GCSE grades or grades in equivalent qualifications.3

This is for good reason. The evidence suggests that students who have not achieved well, meaning a so-called “strong pass”, a grade 5, in at least five GCSEs including English and maths, have virtually no chance of achieving well at A Level. Schools and colleges with more permissive admissions criteria than our own typically offer such students alternative courses with statistically greater chances of success.4

People can agree or disagree about whether or not our own admissions criteria are fair. We require applicants to have achieved grade 7 or above in eight GCSEs. This ‘entry tariff’ reflects our local context. We have the good fortune to operate in the area of England with the highest average student attainment at age 16. In 2025, the LAE received applications from over 6,300 students, more than 3,800 of whom met our admissions criteria. We had, at the time, 250 available places.5

The piece of this story that goes almost wholly unreported is the fact that the LAE’s success is a vindication of contextual recruitment in education. We do not—as our critics, and perhaps some of our supporters, seem to imagine—simply admit the students who achieve the highest grades. Instead, we first admit those who are eligible for free school meals. Only once those students are admitted do we start offering places more widely. (As I’ve previously argued, the government could require all schools to adopt this practice by changing the Schools Admissions Code.)

The impact of this on our student population is profound. Over the past few years, around 40 percent of our students have been admitted ahead of other applicants whose grades may have been better but whose parents were richer. Some people will find this practice unfair. Clearly, I do not. We have never sought to be a grammar school on the conventional model. Our mission is quite clearly to advance the life chances of students who have not typically benefited from an education of the type we offer.

The most important lesson that should be drawn from the LAE’s success, this year or any year, is that those students can do just as well as students from any other background when provided with enough support of the right kind.

What works?

The Times says my school is “unashamedly selective”. The Right is quite comfortable with selection. In fact, what we are is unashamedly specialist. We do one thing—prepare students to study at highly competitive universities, or to enter highly competitive degree apprenticeships (they are equivalent)—and do it well. This has benefits both in terms of staffing and in terms of student culture.

Our teachers are profoundly committed to their subjects. More than a third of them have PhDs. Almost everyone has a master’s degree in a subject they teach. Conversations over lunch in the staff room can take in semiotics, artificial intelligence and the ethics of gene editing. Such colleagues are—to be fully transparent—expensive. So our ability to attract philanthropic capital is an important buttress to our ability to specialise, given a national funding formula that encourages the opposite.

Specialism also enables us to gather together a community of students with common interests and common aspirations. The value of this peer network was made immediately clear when I first visited the school, more than five years ago, prior to my appointment. When I asked my student guides what they liked best about the LAE, both students, both of whom had attended local state schools, pointed to the community. “If I was stuck on a problem [in secondary school],” said one, “there was no-one who could help me work it out. Here, I’m surrounded all day long [by other students] who can help.”

What’s perhaps most significant about aversion to ‘selection’, however practiced, is that it applies only to academic study. There is no firestorm of controversy over football academies, music conservatories or drama schools. The literal practice of selection by try-out or audition is unproblematic in these cases. The rewards that accrue to elite performance in these fields provokes barely a murmur of criticism. The budding opera singer whose aspirations run higher than the Doncaster Playhouse attracts no-one’s opprobrium. The nation will take you to its heart if you are poor and sporty, or poor and musically gifted. ‘Know your place’ applies only if you happen to be poor and clever.

In George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice And Fire, televised as Game of Thrones, self-interested elites squabble over titles, territory and treasure, while a supernatural force creeps across the land threatening all human life.

Intended as a metaphor for the climate emergency, Martin’s fictional device evokes society’s inability effectively to address all existential risk. The most convincing audition for the role of real world Night King is currently being performed by generative artificial intelligence (AI). This, at least, is the eerie conclusion of a new report by The Brookings Institution.1

Why should we look past the spectacle of “Neo Royalism” playing out in geopolitics and focus instead on AI?2 In a self-described ‘pre-mortem’, Brookings researchers conclude that “the risks of utilizing AI in education overshadow its benefits”. This is because AI threatens to undermine children’s “foundational development” in two ways: by encouraging them to outsource their thinking and by eroding the relationships that make learning possible.

Risks outweigh benefits

Brookings is no Cassandra. As its report recognises, there are obvious benefits to the use of AI in education. Children with speech and communications challenges able to talk to their peers using digital voices; AI-generated virtual reality environments that make history lessons come alive; learning materials that adapt for contextual relevance based on user feedback and AI prompts—these and many more applications promise to enhance learning for millions of children. Then there is the potential for AI to reduce teachers’ administrative workload, providing more time for student relationships.

But Brookings researchers conclude that these benefits “pale in comparison to the risks of AI,” which include undermining children’s cognitive and emotional development, eroding trust in learning relationships, increasing inequality, and much more (see Figure 1 below).

Figure 1: Potential benefits and risks of AI in education (Brookings)

There is good evidence that adults who use AI extensively experience atrophy in certain basic cognitive functions, but retain the critical acuity needed to check AI outputs. As Brookings points out, we cannot be anything like as sanguine about the impact of unrestrained AI use among children and adolescents who have yet to develop that critical acuity. We also have a responsibility to safeguard children and adolescents that is quite different from our responsibility towards our adult peers.

The risk is that our framing of the AI opportunity occludes our moral sense. MIT scholar Justin Reich has rightly challenged the assumption that the rapid adoption of all new technology is synonymous with progress. Reich argues that we should be particularly suspicious of ‘arrival’ technologies, those that enter our professional and personal lives without our conscious deliberation. AI is such a technology: introduced virtually overnight, freely available to students outside of schools and colleges, and designed for general use, so lacking the sort of guardrails needed to support students in their learning.

In fact, there is very thin evidence to suggest that adopting new technologies ever equates to progress in education. For example, researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University, reached a tellingly different conclusion when comparing middle schoolers’ engagement with continuous prose online and in print. If learning is the objective of reading, they found, print is a superior technology to digital media because it allows children to make more durable connections between new information and what they know already (what educational psychologists call semantic encoding). Educators should recall this example, among many others, when facing the deadening pressure from politicians to use this or that AI platform.

How should educators respond?

My own view is that the existential nature of the risks posed by AI makes the case for its inclusion in the school curriculum stronger, not weaker. Students with access to AI tools need to learn how and when to use them responsibly, how and when to question their outputs, and how and when they should not be used at all. They need to receive this guidance from their teachers and to explore these ideas in the context of the trusted relationships that make learning possible. This is necessary, not least so that AI can remain, in the words of Daron Acemoglu, ‘human centred’.

Brookings recommends a three pronged approach. First, schools should carefully titrate students’ access to AI, as part of an overall curriculum plan and using evidence-based pedgagogies that are age- and context-appropriate. Platforms that give teachers control over this process—such as the Aiden platform used by an increasing number of schools in the Gulf States—can be used productively.3 A parallel report, the OECD’s Digital Education Outlook, concludes that responsible use of AI is likely to involve successive iterations of learning tasks along with ample time for reflection.4 The most important thing is that educators gain control of the technology and not allow students to outsource brain work necessary to growth.

Subscribe now

Second, educators a can develop their own and their students’ holistic AI literacy, to encourage responsible AI use in schools, colleges and beyond. This involves students being able to do more than just recognise when AI use is simply a modesty panel for naked plagiarism. Students need a moral framework for the use of AI in the home, in school, as a tool that plays into their personal relationships, in college and, eventually, in the workplace. The adults in their lives need to model all of these things and to do so informed by the best available evidence.

Third, educators must develop ethical procedures to protect students from the harmful effects of irresponsible AI use and inappropriate AI platforms. Most AI tools available to students were never intended for their use; others are based on foundational large language models that continue to evolve in ways that are, too often, unpoliced. Safeguarding students in this environment will require vigilance from educators but also a level of dirigisme from policymakers that is so far lacking. Something like Australia’s ban on social media may be too crude a policy instrument for AI, but embodies a commitment to a ‘no harm’ principle that should equally apply here.

Reasons for optimism

I am a little more optimistic than Brookings’ analysis would suggest. My reasons for optimism lie in my day-to-day interaction with students. Among my own, there is already a groundswell of AI scepticism. I doubt this experience is unique.5 Some adolescents recognise the negative effects of outsourcing ‘real’ thinking to chatbots; many more are distrustful of their outputs. The fact that AI learning tools are of uneven quality across the curriculum—reasonable in English, for example, downright poor in Chemistry—has provided a healthy basis for comparison and stoked a critical response.

My second reason for optimism reflects the fact that schools and school systems are notoriously slow adopters of technology. Although the sector is alive globally with discussion about potential applications, I have attended enough conferences and network meetings and visited enough schools and colleges to know that what’s happening on the ground is often quite modest. Thankfully, the two exceptions to that global rule—the Gulf States and the District of Shanghai—are also the jurisdictions in which governance frameworks are most evolved.

Brookings researchers do not identify new risks from the use of AI in education. The value of their analysis lies in how clearly they draws the vectors of potential misuse. Left unchecked, the result of these processes could be generational, ecological, and potentially irreversible. It’s hard to imagine a world made up of people without cognitive agency, unable to form durable relationships with one another; but I doubt any of us would want to live there.

Trinity Hall College, Cambridge was last week forced to re-state its commitment to inclusive admissions after a leaked internal memo suggested a plan to focus student recruitment on a handful of elite fee-paying schools. After a week of general press pillory, Mary Hockaday, Master of Trinity Hall and former head of the BBC World Service, declared the college was “proud to support opportunity across the nation,” concluding “our commitment to that, and our students, has not changed”.

I‘ve no idea whether the offending memo was, as Hockaday claimed, a piece of loose drafting by an unreconstructed admissions officer, or evidence of something more considered. A public relations debacle was all-but-guaranteed by the inclusion, in the same or sequential sentences, of the words “Cambridge admissions”, “Eton”, “St. Paul’s” and “Winchester”, along with the unfortunate implication that students from those schools were more ready for university life than any others in the country.

Attention has focused on the socially regressive implications of a tin-eared missive. What most reactions have missed is the commentary it offers on government curriculum policy of the past decade. Trinity Hall is trying to recruit more students into classics, modern languages and music. These subjects have become virtually the exclusive preserve of fee-paying schools as their cash-strapped state counterparts have transfused available resources into the Ebacc, those subjects that contribute most towards official measures of school effectiveness. This is a more profound source of preferential treatment for the privately educated than any college admissions office could devise. The whole episode is shot through with ignominy.

Share

But why should most people care who, precisely, gets to go to an Oxford or Cambridge college—be they brainy and rich or just brainy? To many, all of this smacks of the ‘Matthew effect’ of compounding advantage. The effect, named after the parable of the talents—“To every one who has, more will be given,” (Matthew 25:29)—refers to the tendency for initial advantages, in wealth or talent to compound over time, leading to ever more unequal social outcomes. In our book Greater Expectations, Ian Warwick and I identified fear of the Matthew effect as a key barrier to education policies that accelerate social mobility. And social mobility in the (profoundly unequal) United Kingdom remains first and foremost a function of education.

Analysis by the Sutton Trust demonstrates that elite university attendance has a levelling up effect not present in other forms of higher education. The graph below below shows the relationship between household income (the x axis) and income at age 30 (the y axis) among graduates of different types of university.

Income versus socio-economic background by alma mater (Sutton Trust)

Among graduates of the UK’s most competitive universities—Oxford, Cambridge, the LSE and Imperial College—those who had received free school meals were only fractionally less likely than those who had been privately educated to find themselves among top wage earners by age 30. Strikingly, the poorest students graduating from the most competitive universities were around nine percentage points more likely than the richest students attending any other university to feature among top earners by the time they had established themselves in their careers.

It’s become far too easy to frame this development as essentially a neoliberal hypocricy, lifting individuals out of poverty but leaving communities untouched. I’m as concerned as anyone with the obstinacy of disadvantage in specific communities and regions, but as a serving headteacher I’m also acutely aware of the positive feedback loop created by socially mobile young people. In my experience, these are not young people fleeing their households; they are young people transforming their households.

Outside of that charmed circle of graduates, however, the importance of university education versus family background seemed to recede steadily. Almost everyone included in the Sutton Trust sample benefited from going to university—any university—when compared to their school leaving peers. But ‘levelling up’? Not really. On the Sutton Trust analysis, someone from a well-off home who didn’t go to university was about as likely to be a top earner as a someone from a poorer home who went to one the country’s least selective universities. The school leaver pulled fractionally ahead if the school they attended charged fees. Typically, each rung in the household income scale cancelled out a rung in the implicit university hierarchy.

Like any social scientific study, this analysis yields multiple lessons, not all of them easily reconciled. University still seems to pay off for most young people—or did, for the cohorts in the survey—but only attending an elite university seems to matter more than your family background. Attending an elite university remains perhaps surprisingly significant even for students from the most affluent homes. By contrast, attending a less competitive university offers very uncertain benefits for the wealthiest students in state schools or those in private education. Related work on degree subject adds a layer of complexity, as does class of degree achieved, but neither fully dislodges the conclusion that where a student goes to university matters more than what they do there or how well they do it.

None of the above means we should valorize elite universities as engines of social mobility. Both Oxford and Cambridge have done a better job in the past 20 years recruiting students from state schools, but neither has made much progress recruiting students from the poorest homes.1 The Sutton Trust analysis could be read as an illustration of survivor bias, signifying nothing so much as the fact that anyone able to secure a place at one of the most competitive universities in the country is probably likely to do well in later professional life. On the other hand, these findings offer a strong rebuttal to those bemoaning the impact of more inclusive recruitment on elite universities themselves. As has been found in the United States, more inclusive student recruitment has not produced less successful alumni.

At the time of writing, Oxford has just made offers to its next crop of potential undergraduates. Cambridge will do so in a little over a week. Those offers will matter to everyone who receives them—if to some more than others. The Sutton Trust analysis suggests that who receives those offers should matter to everyone.

Professor Becky Francis’s recommendations for how England should reform its national curriculum have successfully divided opinion. No other reception was possible. My own first reaction—and, bear with me on this—was to recall the Forster Act of 1870. The two reforms have more in common that the assonance of their lead author’s names.

The Forster Act, or The Education Reform Act, to give it its proper name, established the basis for universal primary education in England. Historians have generally accepted that it was a symbolically progressive but substantively conservative piece of legislation that nonetheless laid the foundations for more fundamental change.

The Francis Review’s self-confessed guiding principle—“evolution not revolution”—recalls Forsterism while being in sync with the prevailing caution of Starmerism. But these are not the 1870s. The electorate has so far judged caution to be a singularly inadequate response to the challenges facing modern Britain. Many people, perhaps most, clearly want a revolution—in public services, at least. What does that mean for an avowedly incrementalist approach to education reform?

What’s good?

Francis and the wider review panel deserve plaudits. The Review’s 196 pages contain many sound recommendations. Arts education has atrophied in state secondary schools since the introduction of the Ebacc. The panel is right to call for its restoration. The panel is right, too, to propose a change in the burden of assessment—not so much a reduction as a redistribution: more testing in the early years of secondary school, less at age 16. A call for schools to focus on oracy is worthy, if unoriginal. More refreshing is an assertion of every students’ right to be able to study all three sciences in depth—an overdue recognition of the need to increase the nation’s scientific literacy.

Subscribe now

The panel makes two urgent calls for schools to focus on developing skills that are directly relevant to life in the Twenty-first Century. The first is to develop young people’s media literacy. This could hardly be more needed. The AI Security Institute concluded in July that chatbots were between 15 and 40 percent more effective engines of political propaganda than traditional medial. The second imperative is to teach more adolescents how to manage their finances. Not only will this contribute to what Andreas Schliecher at the OECD calls “a greater sense of empowerment”, it will also help protect them from falling pretty to online ‘finfluencers’.

The panel is also right to point out that the national curriculum, any national curriculum, should only be a part of what happens in school. Time and resources should be devoted to what is often rather bloodlessly called “non examined activity”—or, the process of teaching young people how to ground themselves in the world with confidence and optimism.

A focus on the teaching of “universal virtue” is not necessarily a nudge in the direction of authoritarianism—though, after 2029, who knows? And who does not believe that young people need a greater understanding of sustainability? (Leader writers for The Daily Mail aside.) Come to that, when was the last time a major school reform was pioneered by experts following serious consideration of a significant body of evidence, rather than at the whim of a politician?

What’s less good?

These are not small contributions, but neither are they a cri de couer for a revived schooling system. Readers over the age of 45 will not be stirred by memories of “Education, Education, Education”, Labour’s galvanizing message of 1997.

The Department for Education has actually shown more dirigisme than the review panel: not only scrapping the Ebacc but also consulting on “an improved version of Progress 8 and Attainment 8 that balances a strong academic core with breadth and student choice”. The DfE proposal is at an early stage, but is similar in scope and outline to the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme. The IB MYP also encourages breadth, enables eight carefully curated subject choices, and results in an overall ‘score’ that can serve as a proxy for individual and school attainment.

There is a certain irony that the consultation comes only weeks after the government withdrew so-called ‘large programme’ funding from the IB Diploma, a move which is likely to make it the exclusive preserve of fee-paying schools.

The Review betrays its origins in its equivocal attempt to balance what it calls every child’s entitlement to a shared baseline of knowledge and skills with most teachers’ preference for professional independence. I’m not sure these points are at all commensurate, but I do strongly agree that teachers must be active curriculum designers to be fully effective in supporting students’ learning. The panel calls this “professional autonomy within entitlement”.

A more constructive contribution would have been to throw out the language of autonomy altogether, in preference for something more professionally mature. My last book, Greater Expectations, makes a case for the term ‘agency’ as that better alternative. My reasoning is too intricate—and too long—to repeat here. Suffice it to say that teachers could learn from doctors in aspiring to ‘best practice’ rather than necessarily to original practice.

What’s missing?

The Review only indirectly addresses the engagement crisis that affects British schoolchildren more severely than those growing up elsewhere. To the extent that it has anything specific to say about this dispiriting picture, it concludes that we should “facilitate more successful transitions” between primary and secondary school—which seems more like a restatement of the problem that a step towards a solution.

Otherwise, we are left with the need for diagnostic testing in English and maths in Year 8. I’ve no strong objection to such testing, but it does play to the peculiarly English assumption that all education is transactional, useful only for the next test.

Share Powerful Knowledge

The Review has too little to say about the related topic of White working class underachievement. In fact, the term ‘working class’ does not appear in the final report. Gestures towards “inequality of access” in subjects such as Drama, Music and Design Technology are no substitute for a sustained engagement with the most politically charged fault line in English schooling today.

Another notable absence is any more nuanced thinking about how we ignite in young people the capacity for genuine critical thinking. This would have been a natural complement to the report’s welcome focus on media literacy and, in a world both empowered and imperilled by AI, would seem existentially important. Perhaps we are to conclude that the changes proposed to various subject syllabi will overturn schools’ tendency to develop compliance at the expense of creativity. I am unpersuaded.

What’s next?

The English philosopher John Gray argues that the professional classes suffer from a reflexive faith in credentialed authority and bureaucratic process—a modern manifestation of Douglas Jay’s dictum that “the Gentleman in Whitehall is usually right”. The average citizen’s willingness to accept that principle has been waning since (at least) the 2008 financial crisis and lies in tatters since the Covid-19 Inquiry unveiled chaos at the heart of government during a period of national emergency. I am in good company in concluding that the British state is suffering from a loss of ‘output legitimacy’, or people’s willingness to go along with the status quo because it generally works.

The Curriculum and Assessment Review Panel is assuming that the public is less alienated from Headteachers than from Whitehall mandarins, less frustrated with schools than with other public services and willing to give schools greater license in putting things right than they will to, say, hospitals or GPs surgeries. They are probably right in these assumptions. Whether a series of recommendations bubble wrapped in caution will meet the moment is something altogether different. Other educationists, such as Lift Schools’ CEO Becks Boomer-Clarke, have been more candid in acknowledging a need for real change to restore confidence.

The Forster Act, for all its caution, provided an opening for subsequent reformers to establish a genuinely national schooling system in England and Wales. We must hope the Francis Review does likewise.

I recently re-connected with a school friend after a gap of 30 years. Thankfully, we have more in common than memories of wet weekends in the West Midlands. For one, we were both the first in our families to attend university. For another, neither of our fathers attended our graduation ceremonies. In both cases, that absence reflected a difficult relationship that never really improved. For our fathers, it was also something more: an act of protest against our respective decisions to remain in formal education beyond the statutory school leaving age.

The tendency for certain groups both to define themselves and to be defined by their relationship to formal education has been a subject of serious scrutiny for decades. Politicians’ recent focus on working class disengagement from schools gives this work renewed currency. In the early 1980s, the last comparable period of working class alienation from public life in British history, Paul Wills concluded that White working class identity was forged through opposition to schooling. More than a decade later, fellow sociologist Diane Reay ruthlessly dissected the many ways in which schools were more amenable to children from middle class than from working class homes.1

Some this disparity reflects the fact that the middle classes are simply better at bureaucracy. As a serving Head, I’ve often noted how the proliferation in the same neighbourhood of schools with quite different admissions arrangements confuses almost all parents, but confuses professional families slightly less—a dispiriting but real source of comparative advantage when getting your child into the best local school. Middle class parents are also typically able to provide more support for longer with learning that takes place outside of school; an uneven playing field that some educators try to level by the perverse strategy of holding back middle class children so that others can catch up.

Subscribe now

Reay’s deeper criticism, however, is that schools are inherently and inescapably middle class institutions. Schools exhibit an “institutional sensibility” that meshes well with that of middle-class families: talk-heavy communication, common assumptions about cultural scripts for success, valorisation of particular forms of parenting, the value they attach to particular types of cocurricular activities and an ability to fund them.

The assumption underlying this thesis is that White working class identity is incompatible with a certain type of education; that, to do well in school, to progress to a university and graduate with an academic degree is to cease to be working class. This is what, in an American context, political scientists Matt Grossman and David Hopkins have termed “the diploma divide”. To be on one side of that divide is to be working class; to be on the other is to be something else. My friend and I know what life looks like from both side of that divide and the personal costs involved in crossing it.

We should not gloss over the ethnic component of this story. In the decades since Reay first published her analysis, university attendance among ethnic minorities has exceeded that of White pupils. The ‘social gradient’ of school achievement, the extent to which it reflects household income, is steepest for White pupils, meaning that the relative representation of White working-class kids at university has actually fallen over this period. The danger exists that White working-class kids will come to perceive educational achievement as incompatible with both elements of their identity. (Add a third, if they happen to be male.)

Class as cultural identity

Reay’s work attracts a fair amount of criticism from academics with differing views on the sociology of knowledge. Much of that discussion is too dense for this summary, but three interwoven lines of critique help shed light on the current political moment and the challenges for our education system. Reay’s work rests on a definition of class that is fundamentally cultural, rather than economic; essential, rather than adaptive; and monolithic, rather than varying over time and, critically, place. None of these conclusions is well supported by the historical record.

The tendency to treat class as a cultural construct reflects the broaden drift towards identitarian politics on both sides of the Atlantic. As journalist Joel Budd has pointed out, figures on the political Right have pivoted from demonizing White working class families for their lack of enterprise and dependency culture to lionising them for their patriotism, traditional family values and instinctive resistance to wokery.

For its part, the political Left, mindful of its own increasingly bourgeois aspect, has taken to invoking its historic origins in White working-class communities and rediscovered sympathy for working class lifestyles. There are complex reasons for both conversions to the white working-class cause, but the impossibility of building an election-winning coalition without them features prominently in both.

The tendency to treat working class communities as implacably anti-intellectual—let’s name the charge for what it is—ignores the substantial evidence of cultural engagement and production by the working class themselves. As American historian Jonathan Rose concluded in his classic study, the English and Welsh working classes were not inert objects to whom education ‘was done’, but active seekers after self-educaton. Miners’ libraries in Durham, Northumberland and in South Wales, tradesmen’s reading circles in London, Birmingham and Manchester, workers’ colleges, even Ruskin College, Oxford—all reflected an appetite for a liberal humanist, rather than a purely technical, education among working people.2

This is to say nothing of the extensive working-class attendance at classical music recitals, participation in choral societies, or the undoubted subtly of much of the folk music produced by and for working class people. As Rose writes:

“If the dominant class defines high culture, then how do we explain the passionate pursuit of knowledge by proletarian autodidacts, not to mention the pervasive philistinism of the British aristocracy?”

It is notable that many of the programmes Rose details were organised and funded by the trades union movement and have steadily eroded along with that movement since the 1980s. But this not a purely historical phenomenon. Education researcher Will Baker discovered in 2014 that working class families routinely exhibited high aspirations for their children, including acknowledging the importance of attending a university. Where they differed from more affluent families was in their belief that they had a fair chance of achieving those aspirations. In the language of sociology, they have lower reserves of “aspirational capital” than those with more inherent advantage. Recent research by The Sutton Trust Into the socio-economic background of professional elites would suggest that scepticism is well-founded.

Share

Where you grow up and live also shapes attitudes towards education. Superficially, West Denton in Newcastle, where I’ve had the privilege of working with teachers and students in the past year, and Chelmsley Wood in the West Midlands, where I grew up, look alike and share some of the same challenges. But they are also profoundly different in a host of ways that affect engagement , not least the North-east’s more fragile public transport system and less diversified regional economy. Working class families in Cornish coastal towns have much in common with those living in Manchester suburbs, but also much that makes them different.

None of this is to deny the importance of Reay’s work. Her key insight—“Education cannot compensate for society because it was never set up to do that, any more than it was set up to realise working class educational potential”—is surely correct. Her picture of schools as alien outposts in working class communities and academic study as jarring against working class communities’ sense of themselves speaks to my own experience and, perhaps, that of a great many others. But it does not speak to everyone’s. If the education system is to re-engage White working-class students, it must do so by restoring their sense of belonging in schools and their communities’ sense of ownership over a particular type of learning.

White working class kids start behind and stay behind at school, a record that dogs them into adulthood and contributes to a skewed distribution of wealth and status in British society. These are the sobering conclusions of three reports into working class (under) achievement published over the past few weeks.

John Jerrim, a professor in UCL’s Social Research Institute, offers the most rigorous diagnosis. His paper, ‘How engaged are low-income White children during secondary school?’—spoiler alert: not very—uses quantitative techniques both to measure White working class antipathy towards school and to explain it. Many of his conclusions are supported by the findings from a series of focus groups conducted by policy research specialists Public First on behalf of the Independent Inquiry Into White Working-Class Educational Outcomes. Finally, social mobility charity The Sutton Trust has published the latest edition of its ‘Elitist Britain’ report, charting the impact of white working class students’ relative alienation from the education system.

None of the findings in these reports will surprise educators. White working class kids think and feel less positively about school than those from more affluent homes or those from other groups. These ideas and feelings take hold early on, often in primary school, but grow progressively worse in secondary. Many White working class children struggle to see the relevance of the taught curriculum to their daily lives and bridle at school rules that seem far removed from their experiences at home. This, in turn, depresses these children’s attendance at school and derails their behaviour while there. The experience is slightly better for girls than for boys, but pretty dreadful for both. Few achieve well enough at school to go onto significant professional or economic success.

If the broad conclusions of these reports are familiar, the detail they contain still has the ability to shock. More than a quarter of White working class children in secondary schools say they have no agency in their own education, Jerrim finds (among Black students, the equivalent figure is fewer than one in eight). Almost half of White working class families say they are disillusioned, disappointed or simply let down by their child’s secondary school by Year 11. The equivalent figure among more affluent families is less than half as bad—itself hardly a ringing endorsement. More than a quarter of White working class boys read nothing outside of school—not so much as a comic book or gaming magazine.

This analysis may not quite endorse Paul Wills’ classic conclusion that White working class identity is forged through opposition to schooling, but neither does it refute it.1 The testimony offered through the Public First interviews suggest that, in some groups, schools continue to be seen as unwelcome arms of state authority rather than as valued community spaces or public utilities.

Jerrim points towards two factors in particular to explain this picture.2 The first is parental and community expectations. Echoing the work of fellow academic Tehmina Basit, Jerrim concludes that white working class communities have lower stores of “aspirational capital” than other groups. White working class parents surveyed by Public First were significantly less likely than others to define success in a way that encompassed getting good grades in school or attending a competitive university.

There is a level of nuance to this story that is too often lost in the telling. It is not so much that White working class families lack aspiration, as they don’t see schooling as a route by which aspiration can be fulfilled. Attitudes like these, while self-perpetuating, are hardly surprising. White working class children attend highly selective universities at less than half the rate of children from other groups. As has long been recognised, parents from other ethnic groups, even those with very low household incomes, are far more likely to see school and university as a route to social mobility.

The second causal factor is the importance of place. Ethnic minority groups cluster in major cities, including London and Manchester, where opportunity is more plentiful. White working class communities are overrepresented in parts of England and Wales “left behind” by economic stagnation. In former mining towns, rural and coastal regions, multi-generational unemployment has become the norm in many families. Poverty of aspiration is being “passed down” like a family heirloom; the education system overwhelmed by what Nobel laureate Angus Deaton calls “the decline of white working-class lives over the last half-century”. Neither report addresses compounding factors that also weigh heavily on these communities—factors like the all-too-common lack of reliable, regular public transport to take children to and from school, let alone to facilitate a genuine choice of school.

‘Elitist Britain’ charts the downstream consequences of working class alienation from the education system. White working class children who disliked school, achieved poorly, and were less likely than any other identifiable group except for members of the Gypsy/Roma community to attend a competitive university are, unsurprisingly, not well represented among the country’s elite in adult life. By contrast, children from more affluent homes, particularly those attending fee paying schools, are substantially over-represented in the upper echelons of politics, the law, the public sector, business and (to a lesser degree) sport and the creative arts. Things have changed since 2019, when the Sutton Trust last took a look at the make-up of the British elite, but only marginally.

According to Nick Harrison, chief executive of the Sutton Trust: “Those who make our laws, run our companies, and shape the national debate should look more like the country they lead. When they don’t, we risk groupthink, blind spots, and decisions made through the narrowest of lenses. And, by overlooking the talents of most of the population, we’re limiting growth and hampering productivity.”

There is not much to argue with there. The challenge is that the Sutton Trust analysis does not explicitly define a target state of fairness from which Britain deviates. Presented with the fact that alumni of fee-paying schools are six times over-represented in Britain’s top jobs, most people will recognise disproportional advantage at work. But is it quite as surprising that groups with the highest rates of educational attainment outstrip those with the lowest later in life? Surely, the animating spirit of our education system is that success in schooling confers long-term benefits.

It’s no criticism to say that all three reports contribute more to the diagnosis of White working class underachivement than they do to a programme for change in our education system. For that, we will need to consider wide-ranging reforms as part of a package of policy measures tailored for different local contexts.

Perhaps the conversation itself is evidence of progress. Five years ago, Ben Bradley, then Conservative MP for Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, tried to ask an equalities question about White working-class boys in Parliament. The Table Office rejected his question because that group had no protected characteristics.

This is the third in a series of posts inspired by the Star Academies-commissioned Independent Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes. The first post dealt with the potential for the inquiry to bring about meaningful change. The second post suggested five actionable strategies that are fiscally affordable and in-line with the Labour government’s stated policy objectives.

This post identifies structural reforms with the potential radically to improve educational attainment for disadvantaged communities, unconstrained either by cost or by politics. I don’t think this sort of exercise need be an invitation either to fabulism (“let’s wish away poverty”) or to miserabilism (“well, if we can’t do this, we can’t do anything”). Rather, I think it is a way of calibrating our ambition. If any of the initiatives listed below have a credible chance of addressing the attainment gap, then they should feature in our national conversation about how we change lives through education, even if they remain at the edges of polite discourse.

That said, my own preference is generally to focus on those proposals that are more actionable in the near-term, so this post is also shorter than the last. It can be read in whole or in part.

My initiatives are:

1. A New Structure for the School Year

2. A National Education Service

3. New Schools for Working Class Communities

4. Restore Specialist Pastoral Support for Schools

An outline case for each reform is included below.

A New Structure for the School Year

The shape of the school year may have its origins in agricultural work patterns, but it is increasingly a prop for middle class privilege. The exceptionally long summer break, in particular, serves poorer children not at all. Longer school holidays contribute to exceptional learning loss, remove vulnerable children from a safeguarded environment, and increase food and childcare costs for families on marginal incomes. The long summer break also imposes unrealistic pressures on term time attendance and workload, making the school year unnecessarily frantic. Arguments in support of the current system tend to be circular: we should retain the status quo because it is the status quo.

There are benefits to changing the shape of the school year, even if the overall number of days spent in school did not increase. More evenly distributed school breaks would be largely benign from the perspective of more affluent homes. Holidays could be taken at different times of the year. Grandparents pressed into service over Easter rather than in the waning days of summer. For poorer families, the impact could be more substantial. Learning accrued during term time would erode less over three or four weeks at home than over a break lasting six weeks. Retrieval practice could take a more routine form, and be more effective, if school breaks were more consistent. And pastoral care for our most vulnerable students would be less seriously disrupted by more frequent, shorter breaks.

I may return in the future to the different proposals for how precisely to reshape the school year. For now, I will stick to the point that our existing term arrangements were never designed to prioritise the needs of vulnerable children. Its time that changed.

A National Education Service

The term ‘National Education Service’ is bandied about every few years, sometimes as a call to arms, sometimes as a sort of ironic reflection on a schooling system that feelings increasingly fragmented. Rarely is there any meaningful discussion regarding the institutional arrangements necessary to make it a reality.

Britain is a European outlier in the extent to which it relies on the labour market to staff its schools. In France, Italy, Germany and other countries where teachers are considered more typical civil servants, teaching jobs are allocated to schools and schooling districts based on need. This would certainly compromise the degree of autonomy to determine their own staffing devolved to British Heads and governors over the past three decades. But it would also have offsetting advantages.

Not least of these advantages would be the opportunity to prioritise communities that are not currently, nor ever likely to be, well-served by the market. By some estimates, 30 to 40 percent of GCSE science lessons taking place in schools serving working class communities are being delivered by non-specialist teachers. While many of these teachers will be applying themselves earnestly, this does not advance educational equity or serve the needs of an economy increasingly driven by scientific innovation.

The public sector generally uses two mechanisms for routing talent to where it is most needed: quotas and subsidies. In the quota system, schools and universities in regions with high deprivation, or where educational outcomes are lowest—almost, but not quite the same thing—would be authorised to train more teachers. Schools and universities in more affluent parts of the country would see places capped. The subsidy version achieves the same end but by making it economically more attractive to train in poorer areas—channelling funding into the training institutions and lowering fees payable by the individual. The subsidy version is generally more effective, though it costs more. Either system, or a hybrid of the two, would move initial teacher training closer to established practice in health.

A further refinement might be to make it a requirement for anyone seeking qualified teacher status to work in the state sector during their qualification period. This would ensure that, over time, all teachers would have experience of teaching in state schools. Those state schools would bear the (heavily subsidized) cost of training new teachers but also benefit from a ready supply of teachers at the most cost-effective point in their careers. And while many teachers so trained would eventually migrate into the independent sector or overseas, some would remain in state schools, as was the history of TeachFirst demonstrates.

There are any number of practical considerations that come into play here. Many private schools and state schools in leafy suburbs have well-designed, well-run teacher training programmes; some schools in disadvantaged communities do not. Recruitment into the profession is already at crisis point in many subjects and regions; putting further obstacles between a willing graduate and a teaching job, any teaching job, may seem foolhardy. Heads of all kinds—including this Head—would bristle at the idea of a substantial dilution to their autonomy in recruitment. Still, the presence of functioning systems across the Channel should serve as a reminder that there are other ways to organise a national education service.

New Schools for Working Class Communities

The Free Schools programme was established in 2010 to bring disruptive innovation to areas of educational underperformance. The programme had its flaws. Chief among these was a failure to stay true to its original purpose. While some early free schools proved truly transformational for disadvantaged communities, others were more a vehicle for middle class ambition.1

The Forgotten, a 2021 House of Commons Education Select Committee report, concluded that, over the previous decade, motivated, organised, typically professional parents had proven quite good at getting schools set up to educate their children; unemployed parents, parents in typically working class jobs, and those that were marginally engaged with the education system—in other words, those parents whose children were most in need of new educational opportunities—were not. Over time, even the focus on community-level activism, a pillar of the Cameron government’s “Big Society”, gave way to the expansion plans of multi-academy trusts, which were almost always better placed to shepherd new schools into existence.

Bridget Phillipson’s Department of Education pressed pause on 44 free school projects in October 2024, citing, not unfairly, the prohibitive cost of capital works alongside a need for reassurance that these projects were targeting under-served communities. There they have remained. Subsequent messaging has shifted to include a focus on protecting the viability of existing schools and colleges rather than improving outcomes through the opening of new schools.

Notably, the parliamentarians who reviewed the role of free schools as part of their 2021 inquiry came to a different conclusion. They did not call for the programme’s abandonment. They suggested instead that the Department for Education should limit free school bids to parts of the country where outcomes for working class children were poor. This seems like a sounder course of action. Over the past few years, I’ve spent significant time visiting schools in educational ‘cold spots’ around England. I have been impressed by the often-fierce commitment that people in all roles show to their communities. I have also been struck at how often people involved in the schooling system—sometimes, even the same people—have an exclusively local frame of reference for their students’ achievement. (I was particularly struck by a conversation with the head of a further education college in a former mining town whose protestation that “our bright kids do really well” was utterly unshaken by the fact that those kids went to university at less than half the national rate.)

For this and other reasons, I still believe that new schools should play a role in challenging settled assumptions and in reframing expectations of the debt that is owed to working class communities.

Subscribe now

Restore Specialist Pastoral Support for Schools

If we are honest about the challenges of recruitment and retention in schools, three factors loom large: money, workload and status. The second post in this series suggested amendments to teachers’ incentives that might encourage more of them to work with more disadvantaged communities, short of re-basing teachers’ salaries and benefits across-the-board (though don’t let me dissuade you, Secretary of State). The social status of different professions is a complex issue, but typically bears some relation to both money and work; I’ll shelve that topic for now.

Workload is at the core of most teachers’ frustrations. I won’t shy away from conclusions that I’ve drawn elsewhere, namely that workload frustrations are, in part, a function of misleading expectations. An honest dialogue about workload would include acknowledgement that teachers’ working hours are more comparable to those of other professionals than to the students in their care. The same principle applies to teachers’ holiday entitlements.

Nonetheless, the real source of British teachers’ frustration is not simply the volume or extensiveness, but also the nature of the work that they undertake. British secondary school teachers should spend around 30 percent more time on behaviour management than the OECD norm—a figure calculated prior to the pandemic and which is likely to have risen. The gap over comparable European countries is wider still. Many teachers see this as low quality work with limited impact on learning, much of it falling far outside any definition of teaching that they understood on entry to the profession.2 What’s more, from personal experience, both appetite for and expertise in managing pupils’ behaviour is rarely well correlated with expertise in scarcity subjects.

An alternative strategy would be to rebuild local children’s services in order to allow schools to focus on the substance of education. If local government is too hobbled by other pressures to play this role, funding could be provided directly to schools to employ trained counsellors, pastoral support staff, family liaison officers and the like, freeing up teachers more intently to drive students’ attainment.

My previous post dealt with the opportunity presented by the Independent Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes commissioned by Star Academies Trust. (The naming is diplomatic: the inquiry will focus on white working-class underachievement.)

I concluded that there was both a political imperative for change, related to the populist wildfire sweeping white working-class communities in Britain, and an opportunity brought about by the expertise of the commissioners themselves, many of whom enjoy greater ongoing involvement in working class communities than was the case in previous bodies tasked with looking into this topic.

This post includes five initiatives that could contribute to positive change. I make no pretentions to originality or to comprehensiveness—that will have to await the Committee’s more considered recommendations in late 2026. My suggestions borrow liberally but deliberately from previous inquiries, in addition to being rooted in my own experience. Not all these initiatives can be implemented without a cost to the public purse—a serious constraint in straightened times—but all could be implemented without fundamentally disrupting the schooling system. These initiatives also align with the Labour government’s stated ‘missions’, other objectives, and, where possible, existing policy initiatives.

None of these initiatives is a quick fix and none should be considered a solution entire. I am focused professionally on what can be achieved within the education system, but I don’t want to leave the impression that this is a task for the education system alone. Disjointed policy-making that sought to separate education from health, social care, and other services is one reason why government has largely failed this group of children the past two decades.

So framed, my five initiatives are:

1. Expand Better Futures on the Sure Start model

2. Improve poorer kids’ access to the best schools

3. Raise the quality of teaching in affected communities

4. Reward aspirational curriculum design for poorer students

5. Extend the Pupil Premium to age 18

Each initiative is described in summary below.

The third post in this series explores measures that come into view if we widen our aperture of inquiry by suspending considerations of cost, vested interests, or near-term institutional capacity.

Share

1. Expand Better Futures on the Sure Start model

Virtually every serious review of white working-class educational outcomes in the past decade-and-a-half has lamented the demise of the Sure Start programme from 2010 onwards. Sure Start, introduced by New Labour in 1998, created community hubs offering a flexible combination of childcare, early years education, parenting support and family outreach, health services and links to training and employment support for parents. By 2010, there were over 3,600 Sure Start centres across the country, many contributing directly to improved educational and health outcomes, greater family stability and improving community cohesion.

Three design features contributed to the programme’s success. Sure Start’s focus on early intervention was a textbook case of public policy preventing rather than responding to negative social outcomes. The combination in one place of services from across local government enabled holistic forms of support for under-resourced families who often found navigating local government bureaucracy challenging. And allowing flexibility in the exact mix of services allowed the programme to be responsive to local need.

The programme was not perfect. Failing to ring-fence funding for Sure Start meant that, when local government began to feel the effects of “swingeing cuts” in the early 2010s, many councils chose to pare back services directed towards low propensity voters, i.e. the poor, rather than those that were more politically engaged. Alignment between schools and other local government services was never perfect—as evidenced by Ed Balls’ short-lived attempt to reintegrate schools into children’s services through his 2008 Family Hubs initiative. The price of local decision-making was, as always, inconsistency in implementation. Some councils simply did a better job than others with Sure Start.

None of these is a reason to abandon the lessons learned from Sure Start. Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ recently-announced £500 million Better Futures Fund provides, in principle, a route back into this space, albeit via civil society organisations rather than local government.1 Over time, an expanded Fund might provide funding for locally-integrated services that could increase working class communities’ resilience and their connectivity to the schooling system. The Child Poverty Action Plan launched in July by the North East Combined Authority is an example of what could be achieved elsewhere.

There is a mantra that public services meant only for the poor are fated to become poor public services. There may be something to this point, but it grates against the reality that Britain is very far from the levels of social cohesion that would facilitate a Scandinavian-style combination of higher marginal taxation with efficient public services.

2. Improve poorer kids’ access to the best schools

Poorer students are less likely than their peers to attend the highest performing schools. Analysis by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) on behalf of the Sutton Trust has repeatedly shown that top performing secondary schools in England have materially lower rates of FSM-eligibility among their students than the average school. Three quarters of these schools admit fewer such pupils than are represented in their local area. Grammar schools, excluded from the NFER analysis, tend to be in more affluent areas of the country. Even so, they educate fewer FSM-eligible students than are present in their local communities.

The under-representation of poorer students in higher performing schools contribute to the obstinate association of poverty and poor grades in popular discourse. On this reading—which extends well into the schooling system itself—schools are simply social sorting hats that place children into attainment buckets already pre-destined by their background. We should not tolerate this view.

One way of improving working class kids’ access to quality schooling would be to amend the Schools Admissions Code to make all schools include eligibility for free school meals in their oversubscription criteria.2 The government could reasonably point to its recent decision to widen eligibility for free school meals to all households receiving Universal Credit as the basis for such a change, and as part of a strategy to combat a broader spectrum of disadvantage. (This would be a significant win, given that the number of students that will actually benefit from the change in elegibility requirements is, to say the least, disputed.)

Schools and local authorities would retain significant freedom to set their own admissions criteria but would gain an additional duty to a clearly-identifiable vulnerable group—sitting behind existing duties to children in care and (currently) those with Educational Healthcare Plans. This would ensure that all schools were shouldering some measure of responsibility for combating educational inequality.

The reformed system would still be far from perfect. Disadvantage is a slope rather than a step. Some—clearly, not all—grammar schools would likely resist rapid change by amending their academic entrance criteria to reinforce the virtual monopoly on places afforded to middle class households. But a principle of inclusion would be established that, over time, could translate into a fairer reality. A change in the code would also potentially stimulate positive middle-class engagement with the second and third preference schools that would now be more likely to educate their children. This seems consonant with the government’s attempts to wean—or to flay, depending on your perspective—professional families away from the independent sector.

Put another way, how can we claim a sincere national effort to combat disadvantage without recognising disadvantage in the Schools Admissions Code?

Share Powerful Knowledge

3. Raise the quality of teaching in affected communities

Diplomacy should not become mendacity. If around one third of the children in Britain—roughly the percentage that identify as white working class—are to do better in school, many of the schools they attend will need to be more effective.3 The British schooling system has never adequately learned the lessons of the rapid improvement in educational outcomes that took place in London in the early years of this century. The central lesson of this experience is that effective provision matters enormously, even if it does not matter exclusively.

As Tony McAleavy and Alex Elwick of the Education Development Trust concluded their review of school improvement in London:

“the improved performance of London schools [between 2005 and 2013] could not easily be explained in terms of external factors such as ethnicity or resources ... [T]he internal effectiveness of schools had changed for the better.”

Among the key changes McAleavy and Elwick identified as contributing to increased school effectiveness were the coordinated framework for school improvement provided by the London Challenge and Teach First, which brough well-qualified and committed graduates into more complex urban schools in large numbers.4

Sceptics about the transferability of these measures have pointed to a ‘London effect’. Britain is one of the most metropolitan societies in the world. The capital obviously enjoys advantages over other cities that contribute to the success of its schools. Three advantages receive the most airplay. First, London is an opportunity hub; students are easier to motivate when they can see, and easily visit, excellent universities and employers. Second, the aspirational nature of London’s large first- and second-generation immigrant population means that those teachers are dealing with a population that is more receptive to education than many white working-class communities. Third, London is a preferred destination for young professionals, teachers included, at the early stages of their career; they bring a wealth of hard graft and dynamism to schools.

I have sympathy with each of these points, but each is more complicated than it first appears. Anyone who has taught in Inner London knows that children’s practical experience of the capital is often tightly circumscribed by family means, insecurity and concerns about violent crime. I taught for three years in a school in Brixton where more than eight in 10 students received free meals. Most children had never seen the Thames (three kilometres away) and many claimed, plausibly, never to have left their housing estate. That experience is not atypical. Psychologically, Surrey remains closer than Stepney to the City of London.

As far as the argument about “immigrant energy” is concerned, it should not be surprising that parents who have uprooted themselves and moved to another country in search of a better life for their children expect those children to make the most of the opportunity. But this is not easily dismissed by an appeal to amorphous notions of ‘culture’ or ‘national character’. Professor Steve Strand demonstrated almost a decade ago that differing parental behaviours among those communities were key to understanding the difference in ethnic groups’ performance in schools. Those behaviours are replicable—with sufficient support.

The third advantage, the relative ease of teacher recruitment, has clearly eroded over time. Twentysomething teachers are no longer habitués of London bars, restaurants, coffee shops and cultural venues; most struggle to meet the soaring cost of housing in the capital. The presence of excellent teacher training institutions remains a modest advantage, as does the relative abundance of mission-driven schools promising relatively rapid career growth. Still, I am not the only Head serving in London who finds that the main reason for losing teaching staff is colleagues’ need to relocate to afford a decent standard of living.

Nonetheless, we need better incentives for teacher recruitment in and relocation to educational ‘cold spots’, many of which have large white working-class communities. These incentives need to apply to teachers at all stages of their career, rather than being focused on new entrants to the profession—those bright graduates that Teach First funnelled into London schools were trained and supervised by more experienced colleagues who generally receive less of the credit than they deserve. Enhanced incentives also need to apply to colleagues in leadership roles. High performing teachers will not stay long in under-performing schools.5

We need a properly funded national pay scale that reflects the realities of recruitment and retention alongside cost-of-living factors in different communities. There is no reason, other than a misconceived sense of equity, why colleagues teaching in the most challenging contexts should not be paid more for doing so. We have relied for too long on the wholly unevidenced idea that teachers’ emotional investment in specific communities will power student achievement more surely than characteristics, such as their level of qualification, that have a clearer market value. This has been to students’ detriment. The current government’s initiative to establish a “floor but not a ceiling” on teachers’ pay provides an important first step in designing proper incentives for the most effective teachers to go where the need is greatest.

4. Reward aspirational curriculum design for poorer students

Like our prime minister, I too am a pragmatist. I supported the introduction of the Ebacc in 2010 for several reasons—most importantly as a good faith attempt to promote a curriculum that would give students from all backgrounds the widest range of opportunities at age 16. As the 2011 Wolf Review demonstrated, schools had become too reliant on delivering qualifications that had little currency either in higher education or the jobs market. The Ebacc seemed like a reasonable corrective.

More than a decade on, however, the Ebacc has clearly failed to deliver on its promise. In part, this is because there has never been an honest reckoning with the resourcing required to deliver the Ebacc successfully. The supply of highly qualified science and languages teachers, for example, has never approximated the demand for them nationally. And the incentive structure in the teaching profession enabled schools in more affluent areas, or those in the independent sector, to harvest a disproportionate share of those teachers (see above). There is also something to the argument that elements of the Ebacc were always more accessible to more middle class children with access to university-educated parents and a greater stock of learning resources in the home.

Developments in the economy and in wider society have likewise moved against the Ebacc-for-all model. In post 16 education, STEM-related courses have raced away in popularity while those in the humanities and languages have stalled, if not gone into reverse—a consequence of society’s rising need for computational skills and the perception that STEM courses and degrees offer greater prospects for employability. This development has, in turn, sapped prestige and urgency from shrinking subjects in schools. It cannot be known whether the impact of AI will change this picture in the near term.

We need a framework for curriculum development that combines a robust foundational element—made up, perhaps, of a renewed national curriculum at Key Stage 3 and including a redoubled commitment to securing strong passes for all students in English, mathematics and science at GCSE—but which allows schools to offer qualifications that are sensitive to their local context, including local employment opportunities. The government’s National Curriculum Review may provide the former; the “MBacc” being developed by the Labour-led metropolitan mayoralty suggests a model for the latter. A more robust role for Ofqual would be required to guard against another proliferation of low-quality qualifications.

5. Extend the Pupil Premium to age 18

Funding for post-16 education has been savaged in the past 15 years. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that colleges lost around 13% of funding per pupil between 2010 and 2025, while school sixth forms lost almost twice as much. Despite the school leaving age having been raised to 18 in 2015, subsequent governments have continued to treat post-16 schooling as an afterthought, or as somehow structurally cheaper-to-deliver than other phases of education. Contrast this with the prevailing tendency in the independent sector to increase resources committed to young people’s education during these vitals years of preparation for university, apprenticeships or employment.

The most egregious feature of the underfunding of older students’ education is the absence of ring-fenced resources to combat the impact of household poverty. The Pupil Premium Grant, since 2011 the funding stream most directly targeted at combating disadvantage, stops at age 16—a tacit, but absurd, conclusion by all major parties that 17- and 18-year-olds in full-time education face no additional challenges if they happen to come from poorer homes. Presumably, no government minister has ever met a sixth former whose choice of school or college was constrained by the cost of public transport; or who bore caring responsibilities for a younger sibling or disabled parent; or who was made homeless during their education. I would be happy to facilitate introductions.

I don’t believe that teachers and school leaders exhibit reflex responses to public policy incentives. But are we really comfortable with a school funding model that judges schools based on outcomes while denying them the resources properly to educate the most vulnerable groups, those whose learning is most recursive, whose families have the least experience of continuing education? Could this not be interpreted as a dog whistle to keep these groups out of our academic pathways, if not out of school altogether? Shouldn’t we oppose this situation in principle, even if combating inter-generational poverty were not a public policy priority?

We urgently need to extend the Pupil Premium to the final phase of secondary education, to reflect both the realities of a raised school leaving age and to provide schools with resourcing properly to support vulnerable learners. An extension of the grant would speak directly to Bridget Phillipson’s committment to supporting ‘left behind’ communities. We must build accountability frameworks for schools that encourage local initiative, but ensures that additional funding directly reaches those students it is meant to support—rather than being used as financial ‘Polyfilla’ to repair cracks left behind by a decline in core funding and rising costs. Such a change in policy would not fully meet the overall challenge of school funding, still less close the now caverous gap between state and independent school per pupil funding rates, but it would be a step towards equity in state-funded education and a vital statement of support for working class communities.

The independent inquiry into white working-class educational outcomes commissioned by Star Academies Trust is the most important educational initiative in recent years, not only eclipsing but superseding a national curriculum review that increasingly looks hobbled by overcaution.

Disadvantaged white children fall behind their peers at every stage of education. In only a handful of primary schools do white British children keep pace with their peers. Just 18.6 per cent of white British pupils eligible for free school meals (FSM) achieved a “strong pass”—grade 5—in their English and Maths GCSEs in 2024, according to Department for Education (DfE) data. That compares to 45.9 per cent of all state school pupils—itself hardly a cause for celebration. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has called white working-class children’s under-representation at British universities “a national disgrace”. Soon-to-be announced data for 2025 is unlikely to reveal a significantly different picture.

This pattern of educational underachievement is inextricably linked to poverty, but poverty alone cannot explain it away. Poor children from almost all other ethnicities do better in school than their white classmates. As The Economist’s social affairs editor Joel Budd observes in his recent, highly readable, book Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class:

“It is as though poverty is a virus that harms all children, but white Britons run an exceptionally high fever.”1

I should disclose a personal perspective here. I grew up on a council estate in the West Midlands, mostly cared for by a single mother, attended local comprehensive schools, and received free school meals. I was the first person in my family to leave school with formal qualifications, or to attend a university. That was some time ago. Today, I am a fully paid-up member of the middle classes—a function of the self-indulgent amount of time I spent at that university and others like it, my choice of career, income bracket, and cultural preferences. Nonetheless, my investment in the subject of white working-class education is as much personal as professional.

Share

Previous enquiries

The Star commission will not be the first body to interrogate the challenge of white working-class underachievement. Ofsted published the results of its own inquiries in 2008 and 2023. The House of Commons Select Committee on Education looked into the topic in depth in 2014 and again in 2021. The Office for Students did the same in 2021, focusing on these communities’ under-representation in higher education. There have also been countless reports by academics, think tanks and educational charities.

Substantially all these reports agree that white working-class underachievement is at the centre of a scrum of factors, each jostling for position from place to place. These include: the fact that Britain is one of the most geographically unequal countries in the developed world; that a lack of opportunity weighs heavily on families in some parts of the country; that unemployment and low levels of adult qualifications contribute to intergenerational disadvantage; that public transport often fails to support disadvantaged communities; that social cohesion shows signs of waning; and, not incidentally, that there is widespread disengagement from formal schooling, often rooted in family experience of education. Levels of school absenteeism amounting to a schools legitimacy crisis in these communities in the post-pandemic period has served to underline the last point.

There has also been ample criticism of the schooling system itself. The Education Policy Institute found evidence of implicit bias in Ofsted inspections as long ago as 2016. The EPI concluded that inspectors consistently treated middle class cultural norms as synonymous with positive learning behaviours and working-class cultural norms as their opposite. Two years later, the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) concluded that Progress 8 and other statutory measures of school effectiveness did much the same. Both fit neatly into the definition of what conservative policy analyst David Skelton has described as “the new snobbery” afflicting poorer communities.2

All these observations form a vital starting point for the Commission’s work, but no more. None of these inquiries has effectively catalysed government, or the schooling sector, to transform the lot of white working-class students. Why should this inquiry, launched outside of government, be any different?

Will anything change?

Part of the answer must lie in the raw politics of the moment. A populist domino effect is claiming white working-class communities the length and breadth of the country. Polling by consulting firm PublicFirst suggests that more than half of white working-class voters are planning to vote for Reform UK at the next general election.3 In May, Reform won outright majorities in 10 local councils and is attempting to govern as a minority administration in three more. In a clear nod to Reform-curious voters, Phillipson has added to the lexicon of grievance when addressing the topic—“these [white working class] children have simply been betrayed [by] politicians,” “left behind”, “in society’s rear-view mirror”. None of this suggests that the attempt to address white working-class under-achievement is insincere, but the Labour government has an electoral incentive to pursue a change agenda.

Share Powerful Knowledge

What is unclear is whether this government has the capacity to pursue such an agenda. In some policy areas—such as curriculum reform—a Labour government is likely to find it easier to jettison, or reengineer, elements that owe more to ideology than to any evidence that they improve the lives of working-class children. The more pointed findings of the 2021 House Select Committee Report, The Forgotten, included criticism of the then Conservative run Department for Education, concluding that ministers and civil servants demonstrated “muddled thinking” and an over-reliance on policies that had ceased to close the attainment gap between poorer and better-off children well prior to the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic.

On the other hand, the Labour party’s affinity with teachers’ unions may make it less willing to address restrictive features of teachers’ employment that can get in the way of combatting the effects of poverty. And the sheer parlousness of the public finances are likely to rule out reform proposals that involve substantial investment, at least for the life of this Parliament. The single largest boost that the government could give to these communities—removing the two-child benefit cap—likely falls into this category.

There is also the sobering, not to say depressing, fact that immigration remains a more salient political issue than education. Absent delivery on the British public’s expressed desire to see a sharp decrease in inward immigration, it may not be possible for this government to deliver on other policy areas past 2029.

Expert leadership

Then there is the formidable expertise of the commission itself. The Commission will be chaired jointly by Sir Hamid Patel, chief executive of Star Academies, one of the country’s best performing school groups, and Baroness Estelle Morris. Baroness Morris is that rarest of politicians: a former teacher who has held high political office, having been a minister in the Department of Education for six years, including a brief stint as Secretary of State. The rest of the commission includes Nicky Morgan, another former Education Secretary, leaders from some of the largest and most effective multi-academy trusts in the country, the heads of professional associations and academics working in the field.

Collectively, this group is close enough to government to be influential, far enough removed to be independent and to follow the evidence where it leads. Enough of the commission’s members have not only first-hand but ongoing experience of operating schools in the communities under investigation. This seems qualitatively different from previous inquiries, however valuable, which have relied on expert testimony rather than expert leadership.

As Budd writes in Underdogs: “no large group of people in Britain is as badly misunderstood as the white working class”. One might well ask: Misunderstood by whom? The answer is those in positions of power and influence. White working-class communities are almost universally governed, represented and, yes, educated by people with backgrounds different from their own. We must hope that the membership of the commission is at least one step closer to the communities at the heart of this inquiry.

Pity the beleaguered politics teacher. Sir Kier Starmer’s Labour government has reached into her depressingly shallow bag of recurring classroom activities and stolen away the hoary old debate about lowering the UK voting age to 16. By the next general election, actual evidence will be required to assess the impact of a lower voting age.

Supporters of lowering the voting age have tended to argue the case from first principles, pointing out clear inconsistencies between the lack of the franchise and other civic responsibilities that can be assumed at 16 or 17, such as driving, paying taxes, or enlisting in the military. Educators also tend to emphasise the benefits of civic education starting earlier in young people’s lives.

I have sympathy with these arguments. Frankly, I not only think the sixth formers I work with are ready to vote, I suspect many would do a better job in government than a good number of today’s Parliamentarians. That aside, what will be the impact of electoral reform on young people and on our politics?

Subscribe now

There is some evidence from Scotland that lowering the voting age leads both to more sustained political engagement and to a reduction in the disparities in engagement between socio-economic groups. But it’s early days; the voting age was only lowered to 16 North of the border in 2021. The impact of Covid-related lockdowns is likely to have skewed the first set of data. A similar study focused on Wales reached different conclusions. And previous expansions of the franchise often took decades to have a clear impact on British politics. It would be rash to predict a groundswell in civic engagement because of the reduced voting age.

Nor am I convinced that newly enfranchised 16 and 17 year-olds will flock to the Labour Party at the next General Election, despite a polling lead in this demographic. There is at least as good a chance that young voters will follow their (slightly) older peers in dividing between the Greens and Reform. I have yet to visit a school or to have any sustained conversation with a group of sixth formers who weren’t openly critical of the British government’s stance on Gaza, an issue about which many care passionately. Nigel Farage may be right to argue that the government is in for “a nasty surprise” when adolescents’ political preferences are first expressed through the ballot box.

For a more nuanced view of how a lower voting age will affect our politics, we must look elsewhere. Specifically, we must consider its effects on the electoral calculus related to specific policy choices.

The past several years have clearly demonstrated politicians’ willingness to prioritise the interests of those voters who most reliably turn out on election day—pensioners—while being rather less responsive to young people who either don’t have the vote or don’t reliably use it. This preference has extended even to Labour, not typically the party of choice for the over sixty-fives.

Share

Hence, in these financially straightened times, the ‘triple lock’ on state pensions—estimated cost £10-11 billion per annum—is accepted as affordable across Westminster, while the £2.5-3 billion it would cost to remove the two-child benefit cap and lift more than half a million children out of poverty, is not. The same preference can be found in the government’s decision to reinstate the Winter fuel allowance for all but the wealthiest pensioners, but to keep frozen in nominal terms the level at which children qualify for pupil premium funding that specifically designed to address the impact of poverty on educational attainment.

More obviously, pensioners travel for free on buses, trains, tubes and trams but, in many parts of the country, children’s choice of school or college at 16 is materially influenced by the cost of travel. We could also apply the logic of Sherlock Holmes’s ‘dog that did not bark’: one of the reasons education has had such low salience with the British electorate in recent years is because those most affected by it have been absent from the polls.

All of these are signs of a politics that works for the older generation but not for the younger one. There will be more than enough of a bulwark to protect older voters at the next general election. Given demographic trends, by the time of the next election, there should be about 10 times as many of them as there will be new adolescents in the electorate.

But enfranchising 16 year-olds at least presents politicians with the prospect of a genuine electoral penalty for sticking to the set pattern of policy choices. Assuming adolescents exercise their new right, they will be able to press for greater balance between the generations in the distribution of public goods. That can only be a good thing.

Share Powerful Knowledge

In September 2023, a teacher at Hamshire-Fannett Middle School in the city of Beaumont, east of Houston, Texas, made a curriculum decision. Three days later, she was fired. The teacher’s decision was to set her eighth-grade class a reading assignment that included a graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary Of A Young Girl, one of the most widely read non-fiction books in the world.

The graphic novel was written by Ari Folman and illustrated by David Polonsky, a celebrated duo who had previously collaborated on Waltz with Bashir, about the 1982 Lebanon war. Following its publication in 2019, The New York Times Book Review concluded, in terms that now seem richly ironic, that Folman and Polonsky’s Anne Frank adaptation was “so engaging and effective that it’s easy to imagine it replacing the Diary in classrooms and among younger readers”.

The graphic novel condenses Frank’s Diary and includes some fictionalised dialogue, but the entries it includes are mostly faithful to Anne’s text, albeit translated from the original Dutch and often abbreviated.

These include entries in which Anne discusses her growing awareness of her sexuality. An entry dated 6 January 1944, written when Anne was the same age as the Beaumont middle schoolers, she describes a sleepover at a girlfriend’s house. Anne asked the friend whether they could "show each other our breasts," as proof of their friendship. The friend declined. "If only she had known my terrible desire to kiss her," Anne wrote. The next page in the Folman-Polonsky version shows Anne walking past a series of nude statues with the words, "I must admit, every time I see a female nude, I go into ecstasy. If only I had a girlfriend!"

The Hamshire-Fannett school district concluded that this, and other passages, including one in which Anne imagines describing her genitalia for a boy also sheltering from the Nazis, were “not appropriate” for eight grade students and that “The reading of that content will cease immediately”. (Anne and her family’s subsequent discovery, arrest, deportation and murder by the Nazis, did not draw comment.) The teacher at the centre of the controversy was first suspended and then quickly fired.

Hamshire-Fannett school district was not alone in its judgement. Five months earlier, Folman and Polonsky’s graphic novel had been removed from the library at Vero Beach High School in Vero Beach, Florida, after Moms for Liberty, a pressure group originally set up to protest Covid restrictions in schools, argued that the adaptation’s use of novelistic techniques violated state standards of accuracy for Holocaust reading materials. One Florida Republican described the adaptation as “Anne Frank pornography”.

Nor was the diary an outlier in other ways. The American Library Associated reported that demands to censor books rose by two thirds in 2023 versus 2022, itself the previous record year. Such demands dipped modestly in 2024, but remained above 10,000, an historic high. Analysis by PEN America found that a disproportionate number of requests came from pressure groups “long dedicated to curbing access to information and ideas”. These efforts were concentrated in states, including Florida, Iowa, Tennessee and Texas, which grant parents significant veto power over school curriculum decisions. Escambia County, Florida, led the way by removing more than 1,600 titles from its school and library shelves.

PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans, 2023-24

Most of the books submitted for ban were by LGBTQ+ authors or featured LGBTQ+ themes, but censorship also extended to Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust memoir in graphic novel format, banned by a Tennessee school board, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, also a Pulitzer winner, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.

Efforts to ban books have intensified since Donald Trump’s re-election as President in November 2024.1 Trump’s executive order banning “teaching ‘gender ideology’ and ‘critical race theory’ in the classroom” has given license to censorship efforts nationwide. The American Library Association tracks at least 112 proposed state bills, 31 in Texas alone, that seek to expand the definition of what is deemed obscene or “harmful to minors” and to limit librarians’ and teachers’ ability to determine which books are in their collections and classrooms.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, has compiled a “compliance review” of curriculum materials used in schools serving the children of US military personnel worldwide. (The review had the quixotic effect of suspending access to a children’s book written by the children of actress Julianne Moore. The book deals primarily with the subversive theme of growing up with red hair and freckles.) In late June, the majority Republican US Supreme Court ruled in favour of a Maryland pressure group in granting parents the right to remove their children from any and all lessons involving material that deals with LBTQ+ themes.

According to the Centre for American Progress:

These actions run counter to the shared value of free speech that has informed generations of American progress. They also violate the First Amendment, 14th Amendment, and Title IX rights of all students and educators, with particular disproportionate impact on people of color and LGBTQI+ individuals.

The surge in censorship has been fuelled in part by the erosion of legitimacy suffered by public school systems in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic; in part by a visceral rightist backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement; and in part by the growing power of populist political movements that seek to assert control by specific groups over the state. None of these phenomena is exclusive to the United States.

Harvard’s Pippa Norris, perhaps the leading scholar working in the field today, points out that populism is primarily concerned with who should rule, rather than with policy, with what should be done. This helps explain both its intuitive appeal and its ideological flexibility: populists have emerged from both the Left and the Right. ‘People power’, Norris points out, invokes not only legitimacy, but somehow also wisdom and morality. It is an axiom of populist thinking that public education should join the media, the courts, public health authorities, civil servants and other sources of credentialed authority in bending to these qualities.2

Leave a comment

It is critical to understand this tendency not so much as hostility towards expertise as hostility towards experts, understood as an identifiable group, an ‘Other’, possessed of qualities different from those of ‘the people’. The charge levelled at these ‘elites’, is not just that they are wrong, but their very immersion in the education system has rendered them morally degenerate, alienated from the popular will. The fact that most teachers, certainly those working in public education, will struggle to see themselves as belonging to any kind of ‘elite’ will not prevent others from doing so.

This social fault line coincides with the so-called ‘diploma divide’ which has come to separate Americans with different degrees of formal education and which intersects with other social characteristics.

As Matt Grossman and David Hopkins write in Polarized by Degrees:

a significant partisan gap between college graduates and nongraduates now separates white Americans, reflecting a popular shift in emphasis from traditional partisan battles over redistributive economic policy to emergent cultural, moral, and racial conflicts on which college-educated whites hold more liberal views.3

Many of those cultural, moral, and racial themes, feature prominently in the books featuring on banned lists. One of the more deviant qualities of educated elites, it seems, is an interest in literature that ‘the people’ find to be transgressive of accepted social norms, and a willingness to share that literature with children prior to their proper indoctrination in ‘the culture’. In terms of populist politics and mindset, therefore, children are at the very tip of the memetic spear.

The fact that media attention remains focused on the Trump Administration’s war on universities obscures the fact that the bigger prize lies upstream, in changing the climate in classrooms that influence all Americans rather than those that progress as far as elite colleges. The goal, also according to PEN America, is to generate an “Ed Scare”, a climate of fear leading to self-censorship among educators.4 In this respect, populism is typical of other authoritarian movements that seek to seize control of the means of cultural (re)production.

It appears to be working. In the words of a prominent US educationist, a former school superintendent and academic, consulted during the writing of this article: “People [in schools] are scared. I have Principals calling me because they’re getting pressure from MAGA types on their local [school] boards. It’s absolutely affecting what people are prepared to teach in their classrooms; absolutely affecting what kids are learning now, today.”

The Ed Scare does not affect all educators, or students, equally. Marianne Wood Forrest, a researcher with EveryLibrary Research Institute and author of The Censorship Acceleration, found that a surge in attempts to ban books coincided with efforts to build support for privately funded religious schools outside the purview of public school boards. Leaders in fee-paying schools interviewed for this article were acutely aware of the change in the political climate in the United States—enough to demure when asked if I could use their or their schools’ names. However, none expressed the same level of immediate concern over curriculum freedom as their colleagues working in the public education system.

‘The People’, on the populist definition, can be a tightly defined group, appealing to public morality but rarely commanding a majority of public support. In the case of book bans, there is little evidence that they enjoy widespread support and significant evidence that they are regarded by most voters as actively “un-American”. Only 16 percent of attempted bans in the states listed above originated directly from parental requests. Campaign for our Shared Future found that a clear majority of survey respondents not only supported teaching now-proscribed topics in school but had confidence in teachers to make responsible decisions regarding what material should be shared with children and adolescents and what should be withheld.

Of course, an attack on expertise necessitates an attack on, or at least an indifference to, evidence. In this case, the evidence is clear: book bans have the opposite effect than that intended by their sponsors. Bans increase the risk of children’s exposure to “unsuitable” or adult topics. A report from the National Library of Medicine demonstrates that book bans inhibit children and teenagers from “critical thinking in a safe, supportive environment”. As any educator knows, curious young people do not abandon their search for the illicit because it is not readily available in their school library. If anything, the fact that a text or topic is proscribed may increase its interest value. The study concludes that book bans make young people more likely to seek information from “unmonitored, unsafe sources, without the support of trusted adults”.

Why should educators outside the United States pay attention to these developments? The agents most directly responsible for book bans—well-funded pressure groups with links to the sitting party of government—do not exist to the same degree elsewhere. Elected school boards at the heart of local government and with wide powers to set and steer school curricula are an aspect of ‘American Exceptionalism’ that most of the world has been happy to ignore.

Neither of these are reasons for complacency. Anti-establishment populist parties appeared to command the support of one-in-three voters across the European Union and surrounding countries when polled over a year ago. Where more recent polls are available, as in the UK, that level of support seems still higher today. Norris’ distinctive characteristics of populism—in particular, its hostility towards credentialled elites, public institutions and policies that promote diversity and inclusion—are present in all of these movements. The epidemic of school absenteeism in parts of the UK, which largely covaries with support for Reform UK, is a clear sign of the erosion of trust in public education among certain sectors of the British electorate.

The institutional configuration of the British—or, for that matter, Spanish, French, Italian or German—education system may diverge sharply from that of the US, but this does not render it immune from populist pressures. One of the most deeply-held values of many progressive educators is the need for schools to reflect the values of their local communities. This impulse finds concrete expression in movements such as that calling for Community Curriculum Making. What sort of curricula will we make if our community, or a substantial section of it, should prove intolerant, exclusionary and reactionary? Alternatively a more centralised state, such as the UK, may offer schools more protection from populist impulses in the short term, but lacks the local buffers that might prove crucial were national politics to take an authoritarian populist turn.

Academic and researcher David Leat has persuasively characterised the school curriculum as “an expression of a collective vision of future society”. Over the past three decades, the vision that informed curriculum making in most functioning democracies has been broadly progressive—consistent with support for a range of political parties, but informed by a shared sense of the importance of ever more inclusive practice in pursuit of a fairer distribution of social goods. Mobilisation against that vision is at an advanced stage politically. Experience in the United States should lead us to expect pressure on educators to follow suit.

Share Powerful Knowledge

In a move plucked straight from dystopian fiction, a software company recently started running billboard adverts on the London Tube encouraging businesses to ‘Stop Hiring Humans’ (see above). The (ironically named) Artisan is pushing ‘AI employees’ as more efficient, less bothersome alternatives to, well, people.

The risk of automation is not limited to Artisan’s immediate targets—outbound salespeople, administrators and those pushing routine communications. Instead, it extends to a wide range of well-paid, high status professional roles previously fought over by ambitious graduates.

As an illustration, professional services firms Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC have cut hundreds of graduate roles in favour of AI solutions on the Artisan model. On some measures, graduate positions in professional services are down by 44 percent over two years and all graduate jobs by 33 percent.1

Subscribe now

It may not be obvious to educators, but anyone who joined a professional services firm, a bank, an asset manager, insurance company or law firm in the past three decades—as I did—logged many hundreds of formative hours finding data, crunching data, and using data to tell stories about their employer, their competitors or their clients—all things that AI is proving surprisingly good at. Small wonder that graduate gigs are harder to come by.

I am not criticising employers for this trend. Nor am I trying to scare-monger. For more than a century, economists have railed against the ‘lump of labour’ fallacy—the idea that there is a fixed amount of required labour in the economy that can only be reduced by technological innovation. Empirical research has repeatedly found that new technology creates jobs as fast, or faster, as it destroys them. Perhaps that trend will hold.

But then, perhaps not. Artificial intelligence is at least potentially different than previous breakthrough technologies. The IMF’s Kristalina Georgieva describes AI as “a tsunami” hitting the labour martket. Ford chief executive Jim Farley thinks AI may wipe out “literally half of all white-collar workers” in the United States and, presumably, beyond. The so-called “Godfather of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton, believes that the emerging technology will shortly replace humans in carrying out all routine intellectual work.

I’m not qualified to judge how credible a scenario this is, or to trace in full its potential ramifications for society. As Hinton himself points out, no one is. But taking this scenario even marginally seriously requires educators to ask some searching questions about what takes places in schools, colleges and universities.

Share

Over the past two decades, educators have used the lure of rewarding employment as a primary, sometimes exclusive, stimulus of student engagement. Attempting to make good an historic deficit, making learning relevant has come to mean tying curriculum content to the prospect of a future career. The most recent update to the Gatsby Benchmarks, the touchstone for effective careers education in schools, advocates explicitly for its place “at the heart of education and leadership” and for ensuring that all teachers link curriculum learning to potential career outcomes.2

The equation of careers, curriculum and engagement is present even when expressed in the negative. Lift Schools chief executive Becks Boomer Clark recently speculated that the crisis of attendance unfolding in many schools may reflect students’ growing awareness that the relationship between current learning and future opportunity may be a good deal looser than they are encouraged to believe.

But what if AI really does reduce the demand for work, either by enabling a roughly similar percentage of the population to achieve a constant rate of output while working less—increasing leisure time—or by reducing the percentage of the population required to be productively employed at all—growing unemployment? (Or both.) What if the animating narrative of education were shown to be not just uncertain for some, but actively false for many?

The most common answer is a variation on the same theme: focus on careers education that emphasises more distinctively human qualities, such as creativity—broadly defined to include everything from visual arts to chemical engineering—or empathy—essential for jobs such as nursing. This would certainly be better than continuing to focus on the cultivation of expertise that can be replicated an improved upon by AI or AI-powered robots.

A more revolutionary response would be to focus on a distinctively holistic model of education in which preparation for careers is one important strand among many. Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom has imagined a near-future where AI and robots can perform almost all tasks as well as any human. In his rendering, this will require an education system that “instead of shaping children to become productive workers … [encourages] them to become flourishing human beings. People with a high level of skill in the art of enjoying life.”

“Maybe it would involve cultivating the art of conversation. Likewise, an appreciation for literature, art, music, drama, film, nature and wilderness, athletic competition… techniques of mindfulness and meditation might be taught. Hobbies, creativity, playfulness, judicious pranks, and games – both playing and inventing them. Connoisseurship. Cultivation of the pleasures of the palate. Celebration of friendship.”3

This is, ironically, also a more conservative vision of education than any to which we’ve been routinely exposed in the past two decades. It resembles closely the sort of liberal humanist vision that, in England at least, has remained the preserve of a certain type of fee-paying school. There is a cruel irony that many of the schools most reliant on the motive power of future earnings serve economically deprived communities, while many schools serving more affluent groups are much closer to Bostrom’s vision.

There is nothing ‘soft’ about the vision, however, nor will it be easy to implement. Developing curricula and pedagogy that connect current learning to future flourishing seems at least as ambitious, and potentially much more so, than developing either in a way that is perpetually tehtered to careers.

There will be some who meet this development with Schadenfreude. After all, doesn’t AI simply present academic learners with the same grim prospects that have long faced those destined for manual jobs? This is a dangerous form of envy. History does not teem with examples of societies that remained stable while educated elites remained unemployed in great numbers.

For anyone with an even passing interest in the role of artificial intelligence in public education, the past three months has felt something like finding your morning treadmill routine swapped for one meant for Usain Bolt. We have hyperventilated our way from fretting about an epidemic of cheating in colleges and universities to wading through user guides to an emerging ecosystem of allegedly classroom-ready learning applications.

Was there a sustained discussion about the proper principles of AI use in schools? It seems not. This is a serious oversight. The approach we take to AI—as policymakers, educators, parents and citizens—will be of profound consequence for society.

The argument so far

The argument I have been building across a series of posts runs as follows. First, the adoption of new learning technologies always involves sacrifice. The cognitive load is not so much shared as outsourced, first to writing, then printing, on through a range of electronic and digital media and, currently, to artificial intelligence (AI). In each case, some cognitive skills tend to atrophy as others flourish. Technologies are deemed successful when, for society as a whole, sacrifice is outstripped by gain.

Subscribe now

Second, AI is very likely to pass this test, offering up more than it strips away, but its peculiar properties argue for caution. Research into the impact of sustained use of AI tools has mostly confirmed the broad pattern described above; but these studies have focused on adults, those who are already cognitively mature. We simply don’t know how routine AI use will affect children and adolescents, those whose cognitive skills are still being formed.

Third, these risks are as much social as they are cognitive. AI offers real time access to the accumulated stock of human knowledge, insight and understanding; but also promises significantly to substitute for learning from other people. This is because reinforcement learning, the process whereby AI refines its ‘personality’ to chime with that of a particular user, turns out to be a two-way process: users are also having their own preferences shaped in a way that may diminish their appetite and aptitude for offline learning.

Finally, as educators, parents and other stakeholders, we have a responsibility to ensure that young people’s exposure to AI is human centered or pro-social; something that reinforces the value of human expertise and interaction, rather than something that replaces it. I’ve offered a handful of practical suggestions for how we can do so. These and other prudential measures can help AI improve our education system so that it helps more people to live a good life.

Principles for Responsible AI Use

What all of this argues for is a principles-based approach to the use of artificial intelligence in schools, colleges and universities.1 These principles cannot simply be downloaded from a central source. Unreflective reliance on model frameworks is no better than unreflective reliance on AI. And the principles that matter most to specific educators and communities will understandably vary. There is no substitute for taking the time to consult widely and to home in on those that resonate most profoundly with your own context.

As a starting point for discussion—no more—here are the principles that underpin the AI policy I drafted for my own school. These principles draw from a number of sources, but most directly from Unesco’s Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. The most important principle is the one that underpins them all. As MIT economist Daron Acemoglu reminds us, we have agency in the way AI develops and is used.

· An understanding of how to use AI proficiently and responsibly is essential for students to become accomplished professionals, flourishing adults and active citizens.

· AI use will be subject to a ‘do no harm’ principle, encompassing both the need for prudential levels of security, the individual’s right to privacy, and freedom from molestation or degrading treatment using AI.

· Use of AI by all stakeholders will be made transparent and subject to the most appropriate existing systems of governance and accountability.

· AI will be used in a human-centered manner, to enhance education, support students and teachers, and to create more inclusive learning environments, but not to substitute for or replace human intelligence and interaction where these are readily available.

· Students will be instructed in how to be critical users of AI, to ground and verify its outputs, to challenge its assumptions, and to recognise its biases.

· AI will not be used to ‘steal the struggle’ from students where said struggle is necessary for cognitive development, the development of vital competencies and/or for the development of character.

· AI will not be used in any way that compromises academic integrity.

The distance between these principles—or, I profoundly hope, those that you will forge for yourself—and the practical application of AI in the classroom is likely too great for some educators, parents or students. As a more practical tool, I am also including the table below, an adapted version of Leon Furze’s AI Assessment Framework. The framwork can be used to scaffold practical conversations about AI use without sacrificing reflection on its ethics.

Neither the principles above nor the framework can be set in stone. I expect to revise and rethink this particular policy more frequently than others in a—probably doomed—attempt to keep pace with developments in the technology. That is a treadmill we will never get off.

Pensioners are recovering from whiplash after the UK government’s abrupt U-turn on winter fuel payments. Having resigned themselves to the payments’ loss last Autumn, many have seen the subsidy restored at a more generous level than they could reasonably have anticipated. What to do with the unexpected windfall?

I have a suggestion: donate it to your local school.

I’m serious. There has long been a trope about aspirant middle-class families where the grandparents pay the school fees while the parents struggle with the mortgage. The truth is that state schools could use some of that money, too.

Under Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ revised revised policy, all pensioners will receive ‘winter warming’ payments of £200, or £300 for the over-80s. Around nine million of them will get to keep those payments. Two million higher earning seniors will effectively pay back the allowance in increased income tax.

The most striking feature of the restored fuel allowance is its generosity. A household income of £35,000 is hardly rich, but it is a far higher cut off than applies to other state support. Until recently, a child from a household with an income above £7,400 was ineligible for free school meals. Even after the government greatly expanded the programme, most children receiving free lunches will be from homes with incomes below £20,000.

Nor is there apparently an asset test for the fuel payment—as would be the case for Universal Credit. Around three quarters of pensioners born in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s own their own home—a higher share than any subsequent generation. The Resolution Foundation estimates that almost three quarters of beneficiaries of the winter fuel grant will be among the wealthiest half of the population.

(I’m not arguing that all pensioners are rich. There are about 300,000 more pensioners living in poverty today than there were in 2011. These are people who will, rightly, benefit from the restored winter fuel allowance. But there are many older people who cannot claim the same level of need.)

Share

Government generosity towards the elderly is to be contrasted with parsimony towards the young. The cost to the Exchequer of the restored winter fuel grant is expected to be £1.25 billion this year. By contrast, the Department of Education is cited as having set aside £1 billion over the remaining life of this Parliament to extend free school meals to an additional 500,000 poor children.

Related funding, such as the pupil premium grant, specifically intended to support poor children through school, remains tied to the £7,400 figure, rather than extended to cover a broader definition of free school meals. Early discussions about restoring the Education Maintenance Allowance, which helped poorer students remain in education, seem to have been dropped. Core schools funding is only now returning to 2010 levels in real terms, but is stretched more thinly by the higher costs schools are carrying to compensate for degradation elsewhere in the social safety net.

Indeed, is is arguable that all of the above, plus the removal of the two child benefit cap (estimated cost around £3.5 billion per year) would come in below the £11 billion that the government is spending to maintain the ‘triple lock’ on state pensions.

Of course, pensioners make up around one third of the voting age population and turn out to vote at a much higher rate than younger people. (Although, ironically, relatively few pensioners voted Labour at the last General Election.) School children and adolescents must rely on their parents and grandparents considering their interests when they cast their ballot.

The return of the winter warming grant is an opportunity for pensioners themselves to act directly to support school-age children. If you can afford it, give the money to a school—perhaps your grandchild’s school, perhaps another. Donating to a school with a registered charity number also allows pensioners to claim tax relief on the donation—something that might be attractive to the two million who will see their tax bills rise as a direct result of the allowance. Heads might like to join me in pledging that all such contributions will be spent supporting the poorest children in our care.

Educationists are often committed to the point of zealotry. That’s an asset when trying to motivate a group of disengaged students in year 9, but it doesn’t make for sober perspective on a series of public spending decisions that are, essentially, impossible to get right.

However, in choosing to support the elderly more generously than the young, the government has chosen to exacerbate rather than to ameliorate a looming crisis in the distribution of both income and opportunity between the generations.

Full disclosure: my mother is in the category of better-off pensioner. Mom, if you’re reading this, I have identified your nearest secondary school. I’ll tell the principal to look out for your donation.

Subscribe now